April 6, 2022 Whiting Awards 2022 Claire Schwartz, Poetry By Claire Schwartz Claire Schwartz. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan. Claire Schwartz is the author of the poetry collection Civil Service, forthcoming from Graywolf, and the culture editor of Jewish Currents. Claire’s writing has appeared in The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. From 2018 to 2020, she wrote a column for The Paris Review called Poetry RX, with Kaveh Akbar and Sarah Kay. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and Yale’s Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize, and received her PhD from Yale University. Read More
April 6, 2022 Whiting Awards 2022 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Nonfiction By Alexis Pauline Gumbs Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Photograph by Sukia Ikbal Doucet. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals; Dub: Finding Ceremony; M Archive: After the End of the World; and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, and is the coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Her writing has appeared in publications including Make/Shift, Left Turn, The Abolitionist, and Ms. Magazine. She holds a PhD in English, African and African American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University and is the cofounder of Black Feminist Film School, an initiative to screen, study, and produce films with a Black feminist ethic. In 2020, she was awarded the National Humanities Center Fellowship for her book in progress, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde: Biography as Ceremony. She lives in Durham, North Carolina. Read More
April 6, 2022 Whiting Awards 2022 Claire Boyles, Fiction By Claire Boyles Claire Boyles. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan. Claire Boyles is a writer, teacher, and former sustainable farmer whose collection of stories, Site Fidelity, has been longlisted for the 2022 PEN America/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her writing has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, and Boulevard, among others. She lives in Loveland, Colorado. Read More
April 5, 2022 Redux In Memoriam: Richard Howard By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. “The translator’s relation to his to-be-translated writer, or victim,” observed Richard Howard, the poet, translator, and longtime Paris Review poetry editor, in his 2004 Art of Poetry interview, “is essentially erotic and an exchange of mental fluids that cannot be entirely justified or explained.” Howard, who passed away last week at the age of ninety-two, won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection Untitled Subjects. His impact on American letters was immeasurable. He published, in addition to his many volumes of poetry, landmark translations of Charles Baudelaire, Roland Barthes, Emil Cioran, and André Gide, among others. You can find here an oral history of his life and work that appeared on the Daily in 2017, when he won our lifetime achievement award, the Hadada. This week, we’re unlocking his 2004 interview as well as his poem “On Tour,” his translation of Baudelaire’s “Parisian Dream,” and an excerpt from his translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, accompanied by a brief conversation with George Plimpton. As Craig Morgan Teicher, our digital director and a former student of Howard’s, writes, “To sit with him was to sit in the glorious eye of a thousand-year literary storm, to be guided through its currents, to be invited in.” If you enjoy these free interviews, poems, and translations, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. INTERVIEW The Art of Poetry No. 86 Richard Howard History and high culture were indeed my real home, and I found them right there in our house—in the library which became, indeed, my precocious playroom. Reading was an interior exile, so that I didn’t have to look away from home, as you put it, just further in. From issue no. 138 (Spring 1996) Read More
April 4, 2022 At Work How Do We Stop Repeating Ourselves?: A Conversation with Caren Beilin By Sheila Heti Photograph by Jean-Paul Cauvin. Caren Beilin’s slim novels are marked by a distinctive dizzying logic—as if she had invented her own variation on realism—that allows the narrators’ imaginations, feelings, locations on earth, and personal symbologies to stretch and twist the plot. In The University of Pennsylvania (2014) and Spain (2018), she emphasizes the ways we are trapped within our own realities, but also suggests that these realities can be wondrous and huge. Beilin makes the experience of living seem private, wild, abysmal, and buoyant, and implies that we need other people because without them our inner landscapes would become too overwhelming—they would keep expanding and devour everything. Her new novel, Revenge of the Scapegoat (out this month from Dorothy, a publishing project) follows Iris—a creative-writing professor much like Beilin herself—from her receipt of a package of hurtful old letters from her father (detailing criticisms he had of her, ways he blamed her for the family’s problems) through her eventual attempt to escape from her life by portraying a cowherd at an experimental art museum. I was instantly won over by Beilin’s writing—so funny and serious and playful. Her books have the natural authority of those artworks that are strictly, rigorously themselves. Read More
April 1, 2022 In Memoriam Remembering Richard Howard By Craig Morgan Teicher Richard Howard receiving the 2017 Hadada Award. Matteo Mobilio. Richard Howard, poet, translator, critic, and poetry editor of this magazine from 1992 to 2004, died yesterday at the age of ninety-two. He was the last of a certain type of literary person, of which I am tempted also to call him the first—I can think of no one like him, except perhaps Robert Browning or Henry James, two of the writers whose work most profoundly animated his life. His approach to literature was both comprehensive and conversational—he lived in the books he loved, all the time, was ever in the midst of talking about them, ever encountering the great writers in his imagination, and reawakening them in poems that staged impossible meetings between literary and historical figures. These were his favorite fantasies: Richard Strauss addressing Arnold Schoenberg, Henry James reviewing a film released in 1942. Such figures (he loved that word) were his toys, and poetry his lifelong playroom, though in addition to the goal of finding and spreading joy in literature, he was committed to stewardship; he made it his business to ensure that the giants of the past weren’t forgotten. His most frequent and vehement complaint about other people was “They don’t read.” Read More