August 10, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 21 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “It’s been a year of storms—political, viral, and, this past week, meteorological. At the Review, two of us lost power for a couple of days after Hurricane Isaias. But to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, the Daily—and our social media, our virtual events, and the production of the quarterly—could not stop for that. I felt lucky to be part of a team that didn’t hesitate for a second to offer help. Hopefully, as far as readers could tell, TPR didn’t miss a beat. And so I’m thinking a lot right now about the power of community. Throughout the pandemic and the attendant lockdown, through all the political agony, through the many major and minor crises of the past months, friends, kind strangers, public commentators, essential workers, shopkeepers, artists, and activists have been unusually generous with their time and energy, whether raising a virtual glass over Zoom, taking to the streets in solidarity, sending a donation where it’s needed, or helping to clear fallen trees. I hope you, too, are feeling the love of your community right now, and I hope these unlocked pieces from the Paris Review archive offer some much-needed respite or an opportunity to think deeply about what it means to support one another. Unlocked this week is all the work TPR has published by a writer who has been very much a part of this year’s pressing conversations, the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong. Stay safe, and happy reading.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director Cathy Park Hong. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan. Cathy Park Hong has been a regular Paris Review contributor for more than a decade. Her poems combine whimsy and humor with precise and often gymnastic linguistic manipulations to interrogate how words convey and carry history, community, and, most pointedly, racism. Her nonfiction debut, Minor Feelings, which came out earlier this year, is part memoir, part work of social criticism that explores Asian American identity and broadens Hong’s investigation of how language upholds—but also has the power to fight—hate and racism. Read More
August 3, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 20 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “Many summertime rituals have been iced this year in the name of health and safety, including those of Hollywood. No big summer blockbusters for 2020; big-ticket movies have been postponed or sent straight to streaming. And while there is more content to watch on our laptops now than at any time in human history, I miss the movies: the chance to spend a few hours in the cineplex’s too-cold air conditioning, eating oversalted popcorn and watching something with a lot of explosions and/or dinosaur attacks. That being said, maybe even more than mall multiplexes and The Lost World, I’m missing my neighborhood theaters: I think it was at Village East—formerly a Yiddish theater, now on the National Register of Historic Places—that I saw my last film in theaters, a German epic inspired by the life of Gerhard Richter, Never Look Away. Little did I know those three-plus hours of huge cinematography, swelling music, and fraught, inspired narrative would have to last me awhile. But! There is a bright side to this theater-free season: The Paris Review can take you to the movies, in some literary sense. Read on for unlocked fiction, poetry, and interviews that can transport you to the cineplex, and below, find details on our own streaming offering: Plimpton!, the documentary (a New York Times Critics’ Pick) about the magazine’s charismatic, intelligent, and always adventurous founder.” —Emily Nemens, Editor Read More
July 27, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 19 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “Founded a decade apart, The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books have had a long friendship. NYRB cofounder and longtime editor Robert Silvers was an early managing editor of TPR, and the two magazines have always shared contributors—the respective archives of both are populated by writers who sent their fiction and poetry to TPR, participated in Writers at Work interviews, and published essays, reviews, and opinion pieces in NYRB. Notable joint contributors include James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, and Zadie Smith. This summer, The Paris Review has teamed up with The New York Review of Books to offer a special subscription bundle—you can get a year of both magazines for one low price, plus complete digital archive access to both websites. To celebrate, this week’s The Art of Distance shares a few pairings—pieces by three writers who have written for both magazines, their voices tuned and modulated for these two different, but related, settings. May these essays and interviews ignite your imagination and stimulate your intellect.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director You’ll find these essays and interviews by Hilton Als, Toni Morrison, and Susan Sontag are unlocked on both sites this week. Here’s a little preview of each piece. The New York Review of Books published Hilton Als’s essay “Michael,” his uncategorizable homage to Michael Jackson and the phenomena of his fame, in 2009, shortly after Jackson’s death. Als writes, “Unlike Prince, his only rival in the black pop sweepstakes, Jackson couldn’t keep mining himself for material for fear of what it would require of him—a turning inward, which, though arguably not the job of a pop musician, is the job of the artist.” Read More
July 20, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 18 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “Record collectors love to spend long hours trawling through boxes and bins in pursuit of the rarity, the one-off, the perfect B side, but I think this same obsession with the archival can apply to literature lovers as well. There’s a triumphant thrill to be found in this hunt for the unknown, and as someone who spends a lot of time sifting through the Paris Review archive as part of my job, I’ve been lucky enough to feel it often. Wait a minute, I realize, we have an Art of that?! Those writers took part in a roundtable in the eighties, the transcript of which was published in a back issue? Colleagues who’ve received many a multi-exclamation-mark’d message from me can attest—there are some buried treasures to be unearthed on theparisreview.org! In that spirit, this week’s Art of Distance lifts the paywall on a series of one-offs, rarities, and uncategorizable pieces from the Paris Review archive. If you find yourself looking for something a little different to read, perhaps one of the following will be a welcome discovery.” —Rhian Sasseen, Engagement Editor Truman Capote. Photo: Andy Warhol. Although The Paris Review is known for its Writers at Work interviews, if you read enough back issues you’ll find that the magazine has also published a number of interviews that don’t necessarily fit within the usual “Art of … ” rubric. There’s the one and only Art of the Musical, with Stephen Sondheim, from the Spring 1997 issue, for instance, or this “composite interview” with Pablo Picasso from Summer–Fall 1964. Or this Winter 2016 interview with the critic Albert Murray (a close friend of Ralph Ellison’s), who discusses the history of the Black American literary tradition. Or 1993’s “A Humorist at Work,” with Fran Lebowitz; I dare you to read it without laughing out loud. Read More
July 13, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 17 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “Sheltering in place all these months has made me realize how much I truly enjoy readings—and how much I miss them. Writing is, of course, a solitary practice, and writers—and readers, for that matter—are the types of people who like spending lots of time alone. But readings and discussion panels are among the few forums in which a whole bunch of literary people get together to partake of the written word, to feel a room humming with collective concentration—and to hang out afterward. Social media just ain’t the same. The Paris Review has always held celebrations and readings to joyfully gather our community in a space shaped by literature. For now, that space must be virtual, but the charge and the sense of community are no less real. In that spirit, and until we can get back to gathering before a podium, this installment of The Art of Distance is dedicated to virtual literary events, two of which the Review is participating in next week, with more to come (including Readings from the Summer Issue on July 22, featuring contributors to no. 233). So enjoy these unlocked interviews and stories with contributors whose events you can ‘attend’ in a few days.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director Kelli Jo Ford and Benjamin Nugent. Photo of Ford: Val Ford Hancock. Photo of Nugent: Jason Fulford. This week, the Review is sponsoring or cosponsoring two free events with recent contributors. On Tuesday, July 14, at 7 P.M., the fiction writer Benjamin Nugent will talk on the Review’s Instagram Live feed with the New Yorker staff writer Naomi Fry about the work and influence of Leonard Michaels. And on Wednesday, July 15, at 7:30 P.M., TPR editor Emily Nemens will talk with Kelli Jo Ford as part of Greenlight Bookstore’s Zoom series (RSVP required). Each author’s work from the TPR archive has been unlocked this week to help you get prepped and psyched for the events. Read More
July 6, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 16 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “As the pandemic set in, a peculiar thing happened to me: I found myself unable to read fiction, despite having always been drawn to novels and short stories over essays or poetry. I suppose I like the escapist element, or can appreciate a good lie; as Gabriel García Márquez, a former journalist, said in his Art of Fiction interview, ‘A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.’ In those early days of panic and uncertainty, the appeal of nonfiction, of facts, figures, and interviews—of real people and real events—was obvious. Public understanding of the coronavirus was murky at best, and I didn’t quite know who or what to believe. Months have passed since and we have learned more about the particulars of this disease, and how best to prevent its spread; I’ve also returned to reading fiction. But I still find myself intrigued by reportage, essay, documentary, and the like. This week’s Art of Distance highlights some of the boundary-pushing nonfiction that the Review has published over its sixty-seven years, and pokes at that sometimes tenuous border that separates fact from fiction. (It’s a border that has at times stretched and changed even within our own pages: this excerpt from Jean Genet’s novel A Thief’s Journal was published as a work of nonfiction in issue no. 13.) Read on for all the news that’s fit to print—or, at least, to be unlocked from the Paris Review archives.” —Rhian Sasseen, Engagement Editor Gabriel García Márquez. I’d be remiss if I didn’t open this survey with The Art of Nonfiction No. 1, in which Joan Didion speaks with Hilton Als. While Didion constantly dances between nonfiction and fiction (she was also the subject of an Art of Fiction interview), there is something especially fascinating in the way she describes the differences between the two genres: “Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with.” Read More