March 20, 2019 Whiting Awards 2019 Hernan Diaz, Fiction By Hernan Diaz Hernan Diaz. Photo: Jason Fulford. Hernan Diaz edits an academic journal for Columbia University and is the author of Borges, between History and Eternity (Bloomsbury, 2012). His first novel, In the Distance, was a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of 2017 and a finalist for the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has been published by the Kenyon Review, Playboy, Granta, and The Paris Review. * An excerpt from In the Distance: He was overwhelmed by an active, all-consuming hollowness—a corrosive shadow wiping out the world in its progress, a stillness that had nothing to do with peace, a voracious silence craving total desolation, an infectious nothingness colonizing everything. All that remained in its soundless, barren wake was an almost undetectable vibration. But in the absence of everything else, this faint drone was unbearable. Håkan had neither the will to make it stop (a simple task carried out with some sense of purpose, like keeping his course or cooking a meal, would probably have been enough) nor the strength to endure it. With the last dregs of consciousness he was able to scrape up, he managed to find a more or less hospitable spot with some water in it, surrounded by decent pasture fields. He tied the horse and the burro with long ropes, unpacked his tin box, and, from one of the vials kept there, took a few drops of Lorimer’s sedative tincture. For a few moments—it was so fleeting—he did not matter, and that did not matter. There was sky. There was a body. And a planet underneath it. And it was all lovely. And it did not matter. He had never been happy before. And it did not matter. Read More
March 20, 2019 Whiting Awards 2019 Tyree Daye, Poetry By Tyree Daye Tyree Daye. Photo: Marc Hall. Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of two poetry collections: River Hymns, the 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner, and Cardinal, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Daye is a 2017 Ruth Lilly finalist and a Cave Canem fellow. Daye’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner, the New York Times, and Nashville Review. He won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship and is the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence and a 2019 Kate Tufts finalist. * “Say River, See River” I threw up the river last night trout already gutted salamanders rocking between the books on my bedroom floor then the river stood up bowlegged it walked like it was drunk like it was an uncle so I followed the dizzy river into my mother’s backyard watched it fall and flood the houses Read More
March 20, 2019 Whiting Awards 2019 Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Poetry By Kayleb Rae Candrilli Kayleb Rae Candrilli. Photo: Jack Papanier. Kayleb Rae Candrilli is the author of What Runs Over, winner of the 2016 Pamet River Prize, published by YesYes Books. They are also author of All the Gay Saints, winner of the 2018 Saturnalia Book Prize and forthcoming in 2020. Candrilli’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, Booth, and RHINO, among others. Candrilli was a 2015 Lambda Literary Emerging Fellow in Nonfiction and a 2017 fellow in poetry. They live in Philadelphia. * Two excerpts from What Runs Over: On the mountain ………….we used to feed each other ……………………..bullets to say I love you. We used to walk around with …………….mouthfuls of slugs and feel weighed ……………………….deep down into the dirt. My family is so far ……………apart now I can only ……………………..reach them by bullet. I check my wristwatch and take …………..the curvature of the earth …………………….into consideration. Read More
March 20, 2019 Whiting Awards 2019 Introducing the Winners of the 2019 Whiting Awards By The Paris Review For the fifth consecutive year, The Paris Review Daily is pleased to announce the winners of the 2019 Whiting Awards. As in previous years, we’re also delighted to share excerpts from work by each of the winners. Here’s the list of honorees: Kayleb Rae Candrilli, poetry Tyree Daye, poetry Hernan Diaz, fiction Michael R. Jackson, drama Terese Marie Mailhot, nonfiction Nadia Owusu, nonfiction Nafissa Thompson-Spires, fiction Merritt Tierce, fiction Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, poetry Lauren Yee, drama 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 fifty thousand dollars 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. Those who live in New York can see the 2019 winners read from their work in the Strand’s Rare Book Room on Thursday, March 21. And for more great writing from Whiting Award recipients, check out our collections of work from the 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 winners.
March 20, 2019 Arts & Culture The Myths We Wear By Summer Brennan Illustration by Eleonore Condo. Painting: Cornelis de Vos, Apollo Chasing Daphne, 1630, oil on canvas, 75.9″ × 81.4″. Shoes are humankind’s oldest invention to aid mobility. Thousands of years before a clever Mesopotamian first tilted a potter’s wheel up onto its side to make a chariot, or a nomad tamed the first wild horse on the grasslands of the Eurasian steppe, people began fashioning shoes from leather or plant fiber to make it easier and less painful to get from one place to another. For the earliest humans especially, our survival depended on movement, toward prey and away from predators, for we have long been both. It is not surprising, then, that many of our earliest stories are concerned with flight and pursuit. * From the creations of Vivier, to Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo, Christian Louboutin, and Alexander McQueen, so many modern high heel designs embody ideas of metamorphosis. The fashion gods transform women into something other than human. They become plantlike, animallike; elevated, but easier to catch and subdue. Flowers to be gathered and collected on their tall, thin stalks. Beasts to be caught and trophied. In some of the more elaborate incarnations, employing protruding feathers and exotic hides, the wearers appear to be in the process of turning into ravens, or reptiles. There are high heels that resemble paws and hooves. * The original fairy tales are far darker than the cleaned-up versions we have presented to our children since Disney came on the scene. The myths that are their thematic forebears were, of course, even stranger. Before the rejected little mermaid became sea-foam, her tender new feet pained for nothing, Ovid’s nymphs were being turned into fountains. Before Cinderella’s dog and horse were changed into footmen to escort her to the ball, Ovid’s huntress Diana was changing men into prey animals, a bachelor into a buck, as punishment for seeing her naked against her wishes. In Ovid, lovers become lions or flowers. The bereaved become birds. People of all kinds and character become rocks, trees, streams, islands, stars. A peacock’s tail feathers are the eyes of slain Argus. Juno changes Callisto into a bear for bearing her husband, Jupiter, a child; later, they are made into constellations, the she-bear and her hunter son. Read More
March 20, 2019 Arts & Culture Walter Benjamin in Ibiza By Frédéric Pajak When Hitler came to power, Walter Benjamin did not immediately realize what the dictatorship had in store. Like many intellectuals, he counted on an early collapse of the regime. To begin with, he seemed almost serene in the face of events. But events picked up speed, and, even though it was hard to obtain reliable news, by March 1933 it was apparent to him that “there can be no doubt that in very many instances people have been dragged from their beds in the night and beaten or murdered.” In 1928, during an exchange with André Gide, Benjamin compared Gide’s thought to a fort, “vast in its overall structure, replete with protective ramparts and protruding bastions, and above all strict in its forms and perfect in its deliberate dialectical construction.” Was this a self-portrait of Benjamin himself? Benjamin wrote that Gide had quoted Louis Antoine de Bougainville: “When we left the island, we called it Île du Salut” (Salvation Island). And Gide added that “it is only when we leave something that we name it.” Read More