April 14, 2021 Whiting Awards 2021 Joshua Bennett, Poetry and Nonfiction By Joshua Bennett Joshua Bennett. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan. Joshua Bennett is the author of three books of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), Owed (Penguin, 2020), and Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), which was a winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize. He is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Bennett holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Ford Foundation, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in The Nation, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. His next book of creative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf. * An excerpt from “Where Is Black Life Lived?”: I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about the role of air in African American letters. The people that could fly. Eric Garner. Christina Sharpe highlighting the link between anti-black racism and the weather. It bears remembering. For the legal studies scholar and foundational critical race theorist Derrick Bell, one of the first characteristics of the black utopia he describes in his classic vignette, “Afrolantica Awakening,” is that it is simply a place where we can breathe. A space of celebration and retreat, somehow flourishing both inside and beyond the constraints of the present order. The sanctuary; the dancehall; my grandmother’s salon, glistening at a distance. When we turn to the written page, where is Black life lived? Anywhere. Everywhere. Underwater, outer space, underground. Even where there is no air at all. We imagine it as if it were otherwise. We conjure a world that is worthy of us. And then we gather there: unbowed, unburied, unabashed in our joy. Read More
April 14, 2021 Whiting Awards 2021 Introducing the Winners of the 2021 Whiting Awards By The Paris Review For the seventh consecutive year, in 2021 The Paris Review Daily is pleased to announce the winners of the Whiting Awards. As in previous years, we’re also delighted to share excerpts of work by each of the winners. Here’s the list of the 2021 honorees: Joshua Bennett, poetry and nonfiction Jordan E. Cooper, drama Steven Dunn, fiction Tope Folarin, fiction Donnetta Lavinia Grays, drama Marwa Helal, poetry Sarah Stewart Johnson, nonfiction Sylvia Khoury, drama Ladan Osman, poetry Xandria Phillips, poetry Since 1985, the Whiting Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The awards, of $50,000 each, are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come. Previous recipients include Lydia Davis, Deborah Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eugenides, Tony Kushner, Sigrid Nunez, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mona Simpson, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Colson Whitehead. Explore all the winners here. Congratulations to this year’s honorees. And for more great writing from Whiting Award recipients, check out our collections of work from the 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 winners.
April 14, 2021 Off Menu Dial D for Dinner By Edward White In Off Menu, Edward White serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times. Alma Reville with a wax figure of Alfred Hitchcock’s head, 1974. © Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos. Within the shifted reality of an Alfred Hitchcock movie there is no steady fact of existence that cannot be undermined. The ambiguity extends even to food and drink. In Notorious, Ingrid Bergman’s heroine is poisoned in her own home by a cup of coffee, while homebodies in The Man Who Knew Too Much feel discomfort in foreign lands because of the exotic food they are fed. In mid-twentieth-century America, nothing could be more wholesome and nourishing than a glass of milk—except when it’s handed to an unwitting guest at the Bates Motel as part of her final meal. In his private life, Hitchcock felt the same unease about comestibles. He adored food and the experience of dining but resented the impact that consumption had on his body: “I’m simply one of those unfortunates who can accidentally swallow a cashew nut and put on thirty pounds right away,” he explained. Of the various aspects of Hitchcock’s identity that I wrote about for my book The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock, it was his existence as a self-described “fat man” that most revealed him as a cultural figure ahead of his time. Hitchcock being Hitchcock—an expert self-mythologizer—he turned his anguish about his appearance into a joke and then exploited its potential for publicity. Though he made his love of food a prominent part of his reputation, he also shared his dissatisfaction with his body image in a way that no male celebrity had ever done, posing for photographs that charted the progression of his weight loss and expressing the pain of counting calories. As with so much else in his life, Hitchcock’s accomplice in this peculiar gastronomic odyssey was Alma Reville, his wife, best friend, longest-serving creative collaborator, and, to quote Hitchcock, “as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen.” Their partnership began in the mid-’20s, when Reville worked as Hitchcock’s assistant director on the silent films that launched him to fame in his native Britain. For the next fifty years, she was his steel girder, lending her talents to scriptwriting, casting, editing, and promotion, in both official and unofficial capacities. And at their residences in England and America, it was Reville’s exceptional cooking that made their home a living extension of the Hitchcock screen universe, a place of sensory stimulation, both earthly and transporting. Read More
April 13, 2021 Redux Redux: Come, Be My Camera 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. Suzan-Lori Parks. Photo courtesy of Parks. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about writing for the screen and stage versus the page. Read on for Suzan-Lori Parks’s Art of Theater interview, James Salter’s short story “The Cinema,” and Claribel Alegría’s poem “Documentary.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off. Suzan-Lori Parks, The Art of Theater No. 18 Issue no. 235 (Winter 2020) I love the process of writing. Whether it’s a TV script or a play, novel, song, or a film script, writing is all the same process. Just the rhythms are different. And where you have to begin and end is different. And how much you can see of a scene is different. What details you need to make a scene. In the novel, there are more words in those details. You can’t just say, “She’s tall and good looking.” You’ve got to let us know how so! Give me specifics. You’ve got to let us know how good looking she is. Read More
April 13, 2021 At Work On Memory and Motorcycles: An Interview with Rachel Kushner By Cornelia Channing Photo: Gabby Laurent. One morning last week, while sitting at my desk attempting to make headway on various writing assignments, I went on Craigslist and bought a motorcycle—a banana-yellow 1969 Honda CT90 Trail. It was something I had been thinking about doing for a while. I’ve been interested in motorcycles since I was a kid, and a few years ago, I took a course and got my license. But if I’m being honest, the decision to finally bite the bullet and get a bike was at least partially influenced by the opening essay of Rachel Kushner’s new collection, The Hard Crowd. Kushner, the author of the novels Telex from Cuba (2008), The Flamethrowers (2013), and The Mars Room (2018), wrote the essay in question, “Girl on a Motorcycle,” in 2001 for an anthology titled She’s a Bad Motorcycle: Writers on Riding. Describing her first bike, a 500cc Moto Guzzi, Kushner’s voice has all the confidence, wisdom, and cool of her later work. “Motorcycles didn’t enter my own life as gifts from men or ways to travel to men,” Kushner asserts, “but as machines to be ridden.” The piece goes on to describe something called the Cabo 1000, an illegal and dangerous thousand-mile motorcycle race on the Baja California peninsula, much of which takes place on dirt roads that weave precipitously through desert mountains. Kushner participated in the race when she was twenty-four, the age I am now. The parallels between Kushner and me end here. Next to the bikes she and her friends rode, my motorcycle would look like a tricycle. At one point during the Cabo 1000, Kushner clocked 142 miles an hour. At its very fastest, my bike won’t go much over 50. Still, something about the self-possession and sheer high-octane energy of Kushner’s writing—and her descriptions of the pleasures of the road, where she feels “kinetic and unfettered and alone”—took hold of my imagination and propelled me to pursue my own, albeit more modest, thrills. Not all the essays in The Hard Crowd are automotive in nature. Kushner also writes elegantly about Italian film, prison reform, sea captains, and Marguerite Duras. There is a remarkable and heartbreaking piece about a crowded refugee camp for Palestinians inside Jerusalem. There are sensitive and expansive considerations of Denis Johnson, Clarice Lispector, Cormac McCarthy, and Jeff Koons, among others. The critic James Wood uses the term “serious noticing” to describe the kind of looking that great novelists do, the revelatory and incisive attention to detail that “rescues the life of things.” Kushner does a lot of serious noticing in this book, of people, places, images, and texts. She also reflects on the various “hard crowds” she has been a part of, conjuring the San Francisco of her youth—a grungy haven populated by bikers, skaters, punk rockers, poets, and dropouts—with vivid, transporting detail. She recalls the friends she had in those years, when she was waitressing and hanging around in bars in the Tenderloin, as some of “the most brightly alive people” she ever knew. Many parts of this book read like a love letter to them, as well as to her younger self and to the places and experiences that shaped her. This interview was conducted via email in late March. Throughout our exchange, Kushner was funny, thoughtful, and generous with her responses. And while I will not, of course, divulge the author’s email address, I can report that it is among the cleverest I have encountered. INTERVIEWER The Hard Crowd is a collection of essays from 2000 through 2020. What was it like to revisit your past work? Have any of the essays taken on new meaning for you as they’ve aged? KUSHNER For years I’ve toyed with the idea of putting together a collection of essays, as they’ve piled up—I’ve been writing them since before I published any fiction—but I wasn’t in a hurry. I needed to find the right through line, an organizing principle that would seem appealing and deliberate. It was only when this phrase “the hard crowd” came to me as a title that I sat down and looked at everything and started pulling out pieces I thought could sit next to one another in a sequence. I excluded most of my writing on contemporary art, because the discourse of visual art is somewhat specialized—maybe someday I’ll make a book of those pieces. For The Hard Crowd, I was looking for a certain kind of resonance. The idea was to make a proper book that is meant to be read in order, from beginning to end, each essay “passing the torch.” When I got to the end, I wrote the title essay and realized this book was some kind of statement about who I am and what I value. This took me by surprise. I thought this was a side project, but the book has as much to do with who I am as my novels do. Read More
April 12, 2021 Bulletin N. Scott Momaday Will Receive Our 2021 Hadada Award; Eloghosa Osunde Wins Plimpton Prize By The Paris Review Every year, the Paris Review Board of Directors gives awards to recognize remarkable contributions to literature. This year, the directors are celebrating two extraordinary writers and taking special steps to ensure the future of exceptional writing. Read on to learn about the ways we are celebrating this year. Read More