September 25, 2018 Bulletin Honoring Deborah Eisenberg By The Paris Review Deborah Eisenberg, ca. 2009. Photograph courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. We are proud to announce that The Paris Review will honor Deborah Eisenberg with the 2019 Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. Selected by the editorial committee and presented each year at our Spring Revel, the Hadada is given to “a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” This is a high bar, but Deborah sails over it. A writing professor at Columbia University, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Eisenberg has published four collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). All four collections were reprinted as The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010). Her fifth collection, Your Duck Is My Duck, was published by Ecco today. Eisenberg, who only began publishing work around the age of forty, quickly established herself as a virtuoso of the short story, her primary medium. She first appeared in The Paris Review, fully formed, as a subject in our Writers at Work interview series, and her story “Taj Mahal” was published in the Fall 2015 issue. In her interview with Catherine Steindler, she explains: “When I was in high school, all my friends said they were going to be writers. And I thought, How come you get to be a writer, and I don’t? I thought WRITER was written on their foreheads and they saw it when they looked in the mirror, and I sure didn’t see it when I looked in the mirror. I always thought of writing as holy. I still do. It’s not something I approach casually.” We are delighted to bestow upon Deborah this magazine’s highest and holiest award. The Hadada has been awarded since 2003, when the Review gave the inaugural prize to the legendary publisher Barney Rosset. Since then, greats such as Joan Didion, John Ashbery, Lydia Davis, Robert Silvers, and Paula Fox have received the honor. Last year, The Paris Review presented the award to the incomparable Joy Williams. The Hadada is one of three prizes presented at our annual gala, the Spring Revel. Known to some as “prom for intellectuals,” the Revel is an evening of merriment, frippery, and fine prose. All proceeds from the Revel support the magazine, which has been a nonprofit since 2004. Claim your seat for April 2, 2019, when you can join us to support the Review and celebrate Deborah Eisenberg.
September 25, 2018 Arts & Culture Body and Blood By Brit Bennett Ten days after a white supremacist carried a gun into a black Charleston church, I was in Los Angeles, listening to a black minister preach about the end of the world. A coincidence of timing, maybe, although the message seemed apt. What could be more apocalyptically evil than a racist massacre within the hallowed walls of a church, an angry young man sitting through a Bible study before slaughtering the nine strangers who had invited him in to pray? Yet on that Sunday, when the pastor talked about the end, he did not mention Charleston or the seven black churches that had been burned throughout the South in the immediate aftermath. Instead, he spoke about fornication. “M-hm,” a woman behind me chimed in, “and gay marriage.” The ladies beside her murmured their assent. Just the day before, the Supreme Court had legalized same-sex marriage, a decision that seemed to disturb the congregation more than anything that had happened in Charleston. I didn’t understand it. How could marriage equality be a sign of the impending apocalypse, but not a church shooting? How could the evils of fornication be a more pressing topic than the wave of racial violence affecting the very congregation sitting in the pews? The Christian church has a problem with bodies, which is ironic, as sociologist Michael Eric Dyson notes in his 1982 essay, “When You Divide Body and Soul, Problems Multiply.” “After all, the Christian faith is grounded in the Incarnation, the belief that God took on flesh to redeem human beings,” he writes. “That belief is constantly being trumped by Christianity’s quarrels with the body. Its needs. Its desires. Its sheer materiality.” Within the black church, this quarrel with the body becomes even more complicated. What does it mean to be at war with your own flesh within a culture that already hates the black body? And what does this mean for black women, whose bodies are doubly despised? Read More
September 24, 2018 Arts & Culture A Tour of Diane Williams’s Art Collection By Zach Davidson, Madelaine Lucas and Liza St. James Diane Williams in her home, 2018 (All photos by Bill Hayward) Diane Williams is renowned for her short, distilled works of fiction. In addition to her work as a writer, she is also the founder and editor of NOON, a literary annual whose next edition will mark its twentieth anniversary. Diane’s curatorial vision extends beyond the pages of NOON, where we are the senior editors, to the walls of her apartment. Some of the treasures we have glimpsed during our staff meetings, which take place in her home: a portrait of a pangolin cross-stitched by her young niece; a watercolor by Henry Miller; original early ink drawings donated to NOON by Raymond Pettibon; as well as the many, often anonymous, artworks and other curios collected from roadside markets and the Outsider Art Fair. On a late August afternoon, over cakes and tea, we spoke with Diane about how her attention to art and to objects has informed her editorial sensibility and inspired her fictions. For the first time, we asked for a guided tour. Our tour lasted well over three hours, and a small fraction of it is reproduced here. In our conversation, as in her work, we began to notice a link between Diane’s penchant for living among sculptures made of broken dishes, stitching around stains in her clothing, and her editorial process at NOON where, she reminds us, all powerful sentences can be saved and made use of. When asked why a flaw or fracture can turn the familiar—in life, and language—into something more arresting, or frightening, or delightful, Diane responded: “We’re all walking around damaged, dirty, broken, and ashamed, and the challenge is—How do you live your life in this condition? It’s an important project to share this condition with others and thereby comfort them. Turning the wound into artwork—something that has magic in it, and extra life, is a very significant accomplishment.” Hubert Walters, “Walking the Dogs” (detail), date unknown I respond to almost everything that’s made by someone who has never been trained, but who is full of passion for what he or she is doing. It’s quite fortuitous if we can maintain what we are born with—a relation to objects that hasn’t been muddled up yet by any ideas about how we ought to see them. Walters was born in Jamaica and was a commercial fisherman and a boat builder for two decades. We bought this painting at The Outsider Art Fair in New York City from The Rising Folk Art Gallery in Tennessee. These are sinister, twinned white people with twin, energetic brown dogs. The yellow background seems to torpedo the bellies of these girls—women?—and the surround is murky and romantic. I will never come upon such a sight anywhere else and isn’t this what we’re on the look out for, too, at NOON?—surprise. Read More
September 24, 2018 Arts & Culture A Responsible Freedom: Patti Smith on ‘Little Women’ By Patti Smith Perhaps no other book provided a greater guide, as I set out on my youthful path, than Louisa May Alcott’s most beloved novel, Little Women. I was a wiry daydreamer, just ten years old. Life was already presenting challenges for an awkward tomboy growing up in the gender-defined 1950s. Uninterested in preordained activities, I would take off on my blue bicycle, to a secluded place in the woods, and read the books I had checked out, often over and over again, from the local library. I could hardly be found without book in hand and sacrificed sleep and hours at play to enter wholeheartedly each of their unique worlds. Many wonderful books captured my imagination, but in Little Women something extraordinary happened. I recognized myself, as if in a mirror, the lanky headstrong girl, who raced on foot, ripped her skirts climbing trees, spoke in common slang, and denounced social pretensions. A girl who could be found leaning against a great oak with a book, or at her desk in the attic bowed over a manuscript. She was Josephine March. Even her name breathed freedom, a girl called Jo. Louisa May Alcott had wrapped herself in her glory cloak, labored at her own desk, and penned a new kind of heroine. A stubbornly modern nineteenth-century American girl. A girl who wrote. Like countless girls before me, I found a model in one who was not like everyone else, who possessed a revolutionary soul yet also a sense of responsibility. Her dedication to her craft provided my first window into the process of the writer and I was moved with the desire to embrace this vocation as my own. Her missteps, comic to bold, were enviable, giving permission for my own. Read More
September 21, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Book Festivals, Benefactors, and Broken Buttonholes By The Paris Review Terrance Hayes’s abiding interest in Etheridge Knight has perhaps long been established, but Wave Books just this month published To Float in the Space Between, a multifaceted, multi-genre work that ultimately lands somewhere between biography and criticism. Hayes’s meditation on Knight’s legacy and impact on American poetry and the Black Arts Movement is conveyed dynamically and with emotionally weighted nuance through excerpts, criticism, anecdotes, and illustrations. The true pleasure of this book is the perennial one of being allowed the clearance to standby and listen as a brilliant poet thinks deeply and at length about another brilliant poet. —Lauren Kane Read More
September 21, 2018 The Moment The Moment of Distraction By Amit Chaudhuri This is the final installment of Amit Chaudhuri’s column, The Moment. Last year, I commuted between Oxford and Norwich, where I teach in the autumn. On Mondays, I took a train via London; on Tuesday evening, I took the same route back. It’s a four-hour-journey: you travel south and then go up again. On the trains I read work by students, skimmed through the Guardian, charged my phone (the London-Norwich train is old but is allocated with power sockets), wrote emails, applied finishing touches to pieces I’d written, talked to my wife and a couple of friends, and, when I wasn’t doing any of this, which was a large percentage of the time, ranged over my collection of music on my iPhone. I never listen to music on earphones when I’m at home in Calcutta – or in Oxford, where I play songs on a small Bose Bluetooth dock that I carry with me. But, like many others, when I’m traveling I create a makeshift interiority. The temptation to create a portable archive presented itself with the introduction of the smartphone. I deferred carrying Walkmans and MP3 players for much of my life. The iPhone has changed our existence – as we think we know, though we can’t, really, because none of us can experience what it means to live in history. It has changed our children, those who were born at the end of the last millennium or at the start of this one: indeed, the smartphone has invented them. For a long time, we thought the personal computer was destined to take us over. Phones crept upon us unobtrusively. I can no longer recall when I got a Nokia. At first, odd though it may sound, my wife and I shared it. The idea of the personalised phone was still to grow on us. I came similarly late to the iPhone. I can now hardly recall what the words ‘sharing’ and ‘synhronising’ meant in the twentieth century, or for my parents. I have no idea what my daughter’s life would have been like had not the smartphone remade it completely six years ago. It’s useless to speculate on the nature of reality in that way. Read More