September 11, 2012 Bulletin The “American Idol of Microfiction” Gets a New First Prize By The Paris Review How fast can you tell a good story? Three times a year, NPR’s “Three-Minute Fiction” challenges listeners to send in the best stories they can write—and read out loud in less than three minutes. So far, more than 45,000 contestants have taken the challenge. It is, in the words of host Guy Raz, the “American Idol of microfiction.” This Saturday kicks off a new round of “Three-Minute Fiction” with guest judge Brad Meltzer. And with a new first prize—publication in The Paris Review. That’s right: the winner will appear in our Winter issue. So sharpen your pencils, eliminate your unnecessary words, and get ready to write. Click here for details—then tune in to All Things Considered this Saturday (5 P.M. EST) to hear the rules for the latest round. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
September 10, 2012 On Sports 1, Love By Ross Kenneth Urken At its best, my slice backhand follows the flamboyant path of a violin virtuoso’s bow striking the climactic note of a concerto—from above my right shoulder plucked diagonally down to my left shoestring. The ball’s tone is a hollow pok on hard courts and a chalky chh-chh on clay that dies on the second bounce. All these dramatics—mere vestiges of a time when I wanted to impress Angela, my middle school crush. Angela played number one singles on the undefeated coed spring team at our private school in Princeton, New Jersey. Her long Italian American locks springing along with her high jumping-forehand, her second serve ball tucked in the spandex beneath her pristine tennis skirt—she was a vision of beauty to watch. Her movement around the court traced the Etch A Sketch path of someone fully in control of the game’s portrait. In Lolita, Humbert Humbert describes how Dolores Haze plays singles at least twice a week with a classmate, Linda Hall, employing teasing tactics against her and “toying with [her] (and being beaten by her).” The particular beauty of Dolores’s tennis game is, for Humbert, a prerequisite for an amenable afterlife, or so he whimsically hyperbolizes one crisp afternoon as Dolores plays in Colorado: “No hereafter is acceptable if it does not produce her as she was then, in that Colorado resort between Snow and Elphinstone, with everything right …” Read More
September 7, 2012 Windows on the World Sheila Heti, Toronto, Canada By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. Can you see that beautiful shrub? It has no bald patch, right? That’s because the shy, moustached, Portuguese man, who seems to live in that house alone, has spent the last six years standing in front of the hedge, where there was, for so many years, a bald patch. He’d stand before that patch, staring down at it for hours every day, even in the wintertime. When I’d come home from my errands and lock my bike to the pole, he would be there. When I went outside to check my mail, or if I looked up over my laptop, he would still be there. At first I thought he was crazy. Then I began to think of him as more profound than other men. Why should we look at everything all around us? There is enough in a shrub. This summer, the patch filled itself in. I guess he knew all along that it was not lacking water or fertilizer or chemicals or conversation. All it wanted was his attention. Now he stands at another empty patch. I sit in a room lined with books, at a round, teak dining table, on the second (top) floor of a Victorian house. He stares at his shrub as I stare at my computer. His body faces me and mine faces him. Our bodies are opposite each other every day, and we stare at things, and wait for the emptiness to fill in. —Sheila Heti [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
September 7, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Watkins, Rothbart, Footman By The Paris Review So many of you have written to tell us how much you loved Davy Rothbart’s true story “Human Snowball,” in our current issue. Now you can get a whole book of his adventures. That’s right: his collection My Heart Is an Idiot goes on sale this week. —Lorin Stein I just gulped down Claire Vaye Watkins’s debut collection Battleborn, and it’s the best fiction from the recent American West I’ve encountered east of Stegner. (See Paris Review issue 195 for the debut of Watkins’s story “Goldmine,” here retitled “The Past Perfect, the Past Continuous, the Simple Past.” —Samuel Fox I am currently on vacation, and my travel companion has been reading David Footman’s 1936 cult novel Pig and Pepper. The story of a young English bureaucrat stationed in the Balkans, it’s funny, fresh, very British, substantive—in short, the sort of book you want to recommend to everyone you know. Footman was an accomplished spy and went on to a distinguished career as a public servant, but in a just world, this forgotten novel alone would be enough to make his name. —Sadie Stein Read More
September 7, 2012 Bulletin Introducing Our Fall Issue! By The Paris Review We all hate to see summer end, but don’t despair: we bring you our Fall issue by way of consolation! And there’s so much to love. James Fenton on journalism, shrimp farming, interior decoration, gardening, poetry, opera, and more: What I had got from my teaching experience in the Midwest was a feeling for the enormous pressure on people in the poetry world to conform to an entirely negatively defined notion of poetry. It doesn’t rhyme, it doesn’t have any rhythm one might detect, and it isn’t written for the ear but rather the page. It seemed de-natured. These poets had forgotten the lips and the limbs, the dance, the whole bodily element—that had been banished. The manifesto was a piece of devil-may-care. It was actually anti-Iowa rather than anti-American. Roberto Calasso on life, film, and publishing—Italian-style: The publisher after all is considered, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, a rather eccentric entrepreneur or impresario—a businessman in a very improbable field. But, if he is successful, then he is a good businessman. The author is the successor of the saint, everyone respects the author. So to put the two elements together is highly suspicious in a way, especially in the rather moralistic Protestant countries. In the Latin countries, less so. Plus! Fiction by Jim Gavin, David Gordon, Ottessa Moshfegh, Peter Orner, and Sam Savage. Poetry by August Kleinzahler, George Seferis, Bernadette Mayer, Jason Zuzga, and Guillaume Apollinaire. A portfolio by Daniel Handler and Maira Kalman, and collages by Jess. Subscribe now! [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
September 6, 2012 First Person Letter from India: The Haunting By Amie Barrodale “I think this hotel is haunted,” I told my traveling companion, Clancy. I have never said anything quite like that before. Now, I have unconventional beliefs. I believe when others tell me they have seen a ghost, particularly if they have details—say, a long nose and a tuxedo, or a suggestion from an old lady that we “touch now, dearie.” But it still sounds like crazy talk. I am aware of that. “You’re right,” he said. “Really?” Then we were both afraid to turn out the light. We were in the Rajmata Suite, where the woman who lived in the hotel used to sleep, back when it was a home. Actually, the correct word is palace. When you turned out the light it was pitch black in the room. In that darkness, I felt—briefly—a unique dread. It was not a menace. Just a funny intimation. To put it into words is to coarsen what was fine: an intimation that one day I would die. Read More