March 8, 2016 The Revel David Szalay Wins Plimpton Prize; Chris Bachelder Wins Terry Southern Prize By The Paris Review Every April, at our Spring Revel—you have your ticket, don’t you?—the board of The Paris Review awards two prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine. It’s with great pleasure that we announce our 2016 honorees, David Szalay and Chris Bachelder. David Szalay. The Plimpton Prize for Fiction is a $10,000 award given to a new voice from our last four issues. Named after our longtime editor George Plimpton, it commemorates his zeal for discovering new writers. This year’s Plimpton Prize will be presented by Rachel Kushner to David Szalay for his novellas Youth, from issue 213, and Lascia Amor e siegui Marte, from issue 215. Chris Bachelder. The Terry Southern Prize is a $5,000 award honoring “humor, wit, and sprezzatura” in work from either The Paris Review or the Daily. It’s named for Terry Southern, a satirical novelist and pioneering New Journalist perhaps best known as the screenwriter behind Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider. Southern was a driving force behind the early Paris Review, as is amply demonstrated in his correspondence. This year’s Southern Prize will be presented by the playwright John Guare to Chris Bachelder for his comic masterpiece The Throwback Special, a novel serialized in our past four issues. Recent winners of the Plimpton Prize include Wells Tower, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Emma Cline; Elif Batuman, Mark Leyner, and Ben Lerner have received the Southern Prize. The Review began awarding prizes to its contributors in 1956. Click here for a full list of past winners, including Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace, Christina Stead, Denis Johnson, and Annie Proulx. Congratulations to Chris and David from all of us at the Review! We look forward to seeing you at this year’s Revel, on April 5 at Cipriani 42nd Street.
March 8, 2016 On the Shelf Give a Warm Welcome to Mr. Darcy’s Shirt, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Hunk alert. Today in dripping-wet Regency heartthrobs: this is not a drill, people. Mr. Darcy’s soaked white shirt is bound for these shores. You know the one: it doesn’t exist in the pages of Pride and Prejudice, but Colin Firth made it famous in the 1995 BBC adaptation. And now: “The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington confirmed that it has secured a loan of the billowing white shirt worn by Mr. Firth in an indelible scene in the 1995 BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice … In the scene, Mr. Firth, playing the aloof Mr. Darcy, dives into a pond and emerges with the garment molded to his strapping physique … A half-serious proposal to keep the shirt wet and molded to its display dummy by using misters like those in the produce sections of grocery stores was deemed ‘curatorially unsound’ … But outside the protective glass case, the library is bracing for a humid reaction.” Has the rise of the M.F.A. left a mark on American literature? Not really, according to two professors who have, as is their professorial wont, crunched the numbers, using “computational text analysis” to compare novels by writers within and without M.F.A. programs. They found “no real distinctions at the level of language, themes, or even syntax. When we went further to test whether the way writers constructed their characters was any different, once again nothing significant showed up. It was extremely difficult to separate the M.F.A. and non-M.F.A. writing groups in any meaningful way … The M.F.A. promises to make the distinction of race come alive, take on literary heft, through learning how to write and the work of writing. But we have no evidence that M.F.A. authors are any better at this than their less educated non-M.F.A. peers. If there’s a quality that distinguishes a writer as Asian American or black, we could not find it.” The French writer Serge Brussolo has published more than 150 books—sometimes as many as three a year—zero of which are available in English. That will change with The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, a 1992 novel about “a gang of metaphysical burglars who enter a dreaming mind and pull daring heists to retrieve its treasures.” (Christopher Nolan’s Inception borrows liberally from the concept.) As Tim Martin writes, “The anarchic surrealism at work in Brussolo’s novel is such that it can never quite be reduced to a parable about the artist and society. Like Burroughs in his cut-up fictions, or Ballard in the mad Californian dreamscapes of his Vermilion Sands stories, he is coolly at home in the deranged landscape he creates, in which hypnotists whisper cryptically to security cameras, dead dreams lie frozen in special vaults lest they explode when they thaw and flowers sprout wildly in cityscapes of the mind as the dreamers’ bodies decay.” Christine Smallwood on The Paris Review’s anthology of new writing, The Unprofessionals: “There are more relationship problems here, treated in isolation; more people alone, talking to themselves, remembering. This is not an accident, but an aesthetic … We continue reading not to see what will happen, but to find out how the narrator will think about whatever happens to happen. Though characters wake up in beds, walk around city streets, or drive in trucks, they do not really live anywhere except their own minds. They sense place as one might sense a phantom limb … Dislocation is not synonymous with disembodiment. A strong attention to bodily experience runs through The Unprofessionals.” Today in facades: Jean Stein’s West of Eden: An American Place is an oral history of Hollywood and Los Angeles that deploys, as Andrew O’Hagan writes, “a wonderful grace in uncovering a monstrous reality.” He summarizes a story in the book about Jennifer Jones: “In later life Jones went to bed in full make-up and hair—it took four hours every day—just in case she was taken ill in the night and had to go to hospital. Stephen Sondheim remembers seeing her in Ravello during the shooting of John Huston’s madcap movie Beat the Devil. ‘I recall her sitting at an umbrella table in the square,’ Sondheim says, ‘rehearsing a scene with Edward Underdown, who played her husband. Above the surface of the table she was bantering blithely with him, but below it she was tearing her napkin into shreds. This was not in the script.’ ”
March 7, 2016 Look Meditations on Hunting By Dan Piepenbring Emilie Clark’s exhibition of new watercolors, “Meditations on Hunting,” is at Morgan Lehman Gallery through March 26. Emilie Clark, Untitled (TH-11), 2015, watercolor on paper, 36″ x 32″. Read More
March 7, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent The Prince of Tides By Sadie Stein From the cover of The Pat Conroy Cookbook. I never met Pat Conroy, but he was a frequent companion at our family dinner table. Since his death last week, everyone who knew him has talked a lot about his generosity, his sense of fun, his menschiness. I knew him as a cook. Read More
March 7, 2016 At Work A Quiet, Meditative Place By Sarah Cowan Joe Gibbons on his drawings from Rikers Island. Photo: Andrew Lampert Over a forty-year career, Joe Gibbons has become a legend in the world of experimental film. His work so thoroughly wrinkles the cloth woven by art and life that the question of which imitates which becomes moot. In his 1985 film Living in the World, he stars as a working stiff named Joe Gibbons, just trying to make it through the eight-hour day with his dignity intact. Existentially bereft, he laments, “I read the paper and there’s so much going on that I have nothing to do with.” He quits his job and turns to crime to make ends meet. When the real Gibbons made headlines last year in an unlikely heist story, that same voice was quoted in the papers as evidence of his moral degeneracy and criminal intent. FORMER MIT PROFESSOR “ROBS” BANK, FILMS “HEIST,” the New York Post said. And, later, in the New York Times: FILMMAKER JOE GIBBONS GETS A YEAR IN PRISON FOR A ROBBERY HE CALLED PERFORMANCE ART. Read More
March 7, 2016 On the Shelf That Old-time Coney Island Dreamland, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Joseph Stella, Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras, 1913–1914. Coney Island today is a fine place to force-feed yourself hotdogs and get a weird rash, but in centuries past it was a bona fide dreamland—so much so that a new exhibition of early Coney Island art is called “Visions of an American Dreamland.” J. Hoberman writes, “As befits a dreamland, the exhibit—curated by Robin Jaffee Frank, who also wrote much of the show’s excellent, richly illustrated catalogue—is a mix of artifacts and artworks and a trove of suggestive juxtapositions … A 1910 wooden cut-out cartoon of Mae West and Jimmy Durante, both of whom got their starts in Coney Island ‘concert saloons,’ is positioned opposite a selection of roughly contemporaneous Sunday pages by the master draughtsman Winsor McCay, whose gorgeously inventive comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland was surely the greatest graphic expression of fin-de-siècle Coney.” Morgan Jerkins reflects on the role of the diary for black women: “The boundaries of a black woman’s social life are many and varied. Alice Dunbar Nelson, who had been married to the famous black writer Paul Laurence Dunbar, wrote in her diary of her lesbian and other extramarital affairs. One of the fears that many black women writers have historically had is that if they reveal too much of their intimate lives, it could reflect badly, not only on themselves but on the black community. In addition to matters of romance and money, these earlier diaries of black women are filled with confessions about strained familial relationships, and personal demons and insecurities … For a black woman in a white world, a conversation with the self is crucial: for when she walks through that often-unwelcoming world she is subjected to confining perceptions of who she might be. When that world insists on racist and narrow paradigms, the diary gives these women a chance to scratch out and rewrite such definitions.” Today in unsolicited advice for parents: take your kids to see Where’s Peter Rabbit, a new puppet musical designed to preserve the memory of Beatrix Potter’s darker side. It’ll scare the shit out of them … but, you know, in a good way. As the designer Roger Glossop argues, “[Potter’s] stories really are not all fluffy bunnies. I mean, Mr. Tod, the fox in The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck, is one of the darker villains you will find anywhere in children’s literature … It is a really foul piece and so, dramatically, that is terrific! We do wonder if some children in the audience may leave weeping, although we will certainly not try to scare them.” Sold! Not unrelatedly, a new book of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s letters sheds some much-needed light on her past and her feelings about the coddled youths of her day: “Later in life, as the Little House series grew in popularity, her letters are devoted to readers—children, parents, schoolteachers, librarians, even a congressman—who flood Wilder with fan mail. The Laura in this period is given to mildly political disquisitions on how things used to be. ‘The children today have so much that they have lost the power to truly enjoy anything,’ Wilder wrote from her ten-room house in 1944. ‘They are poor little rich children.’” To go by the new collection of Jane Austen’s juvenilia, Love and Freindship [sic], no one would ever accuse her of being a poor little rich kid. The book is, at its best, sublimely ridiculous, as in the case of a 1788 work called The Beautifull [sic] Cassandra: “Escaping her parents’ millinery shop with another woman’s hat on her head, Cassandra sets out to ‘make her Fortune.’ Her attempt would last seven hours. For a lot of heroines, that exit from the parental home would be precisely the moment when a handsome man, whether a villain or a preserver, would be thrown in her way. But when Cassandra finds herself in just this situation, passing an attractive Viscount, she walks right by him to devour a gluttonous amount of dessert … The heroine ‘proceeded to a Pastry-cooks where she devoured six ices, refused to pay for them, knocked down the Pastry Cook and walked away.’ ”