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
March 19, 2019 Redux Redux: There’s No Trouble in Sleeping 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. Video still of Isaac Bashevis Singer, by Tetsuo Kogawa, 1977. This week, we’re looking back at work previously published in the Review from three contributors to our current issue: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1968 Art of Fiction interview, Peter Orner’s short story “Foley’s Pond,” and Carl Phillips’s poem “The Swain’s Invitation.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Art of Fiction No. 42 Issue no. 44 (Fall 1968) The problem is that it’s very hard to find a perfect equivalent for an idiom in another language. But then it’s also a fact that we all learned our literature through translation. Most people have studied the Bible only in translation, have read Homer in translation, and all the classics. Translation, although it does do damage to an author, it cannot kill him: if he’s really good, he will come out even in translation. And I have seen it in my own case. Also, translation helps me in a way. Because I go through my writings again and again while I edit the translation and work with the translator, and while I am doing this I see all the defects of my writing. Translation has helped me avoid pitfalls which I might not have avoided if I had written the work in Yiddish and published it and not been forced because of the translation to read it again. Read More
March 19, 2019 One Word One Word: Avuncular By Myriam Gurba In our column One Word, writers expound on their favorite words. Man with beer, artist unknown, c. 1920 My uncle Henry has killed a lot of people. In spite of his dark past, and because of it, he’s my favorite American uncle. Since I cherish bilingually, in English and in Spanish, I cherish my uncles and my tíos separately. The border separates us, cleaving family from familia. My favorite tío was Alvaro. Unlike Henry, he wasn’t a genius. He never killed anybody, though he was known to get rough with English. His favorite T-shirt was a little too tight and its stenciled letters declared LIFE’S A BEACH! To visit Alvaro, I travel thousands of miles, to a cemetery in Guadalajara. To see Henry, I need only walk a mile from my apartment to a skilled nursing facility beside a hipster barbershop and an Irish pub. Henry no longer speaks about the people he killed as an artillery officer, but decades ago, he often rambled about them to my father, his little brother. He shared specifics. He described GIs slicing free enemy ears, threading them together, crafting leis of shriveled lobes. He told about exploded water buffalo dripping from trees, pink rain. He talked about calling in an air strike and obliterating everyone and everything in a village, all life wiped out except for a single baby. When Henry returned to California from Vietnam, the baby followed him. He continued to hear it crying. He looked for that baby everywhere, including underneath his mother’s house. He couldn’t find it. Read More