March 29, 2017 The Revel An Oral History of Richard Howard By Daniel Johnson Richard Howard. This Tuesday, at our annual Spring Revel, The Paris Review will honor Richard Howard with our lifetime-achievement award, the Hadada, for a strong and unique contribution to literature. Long esteemed among poets for his verve and intellect, Howard received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award seven times. His translations from the French helped introduce contemporary masters, such as Roland Barthes and Michel Leiris, to American readers and breathed new life into classics like The Charterhouse of Parma; his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal won the 1983 National Book Award. He’s the author of sixteen collections and three books of essays; his translations number in the dozens. But Howard has also had a distinguished career as a nurturer of young poets. From 1989 to 2011, he was the poetry editor of the Western Humanities Review, during which time he also held the same station at The Paris Review, from 1992 to 2005. As a teacher, he’s influenced several generations of poets. We invited friends of the Review to share their stories of Howard—of working with him, learning from him, and, in several cases, surveying his elaborately decorated bathroom, adorned with the photos of dozens of poets. A portrait began to emerge: of a curious, polymathic reader; a generous mentor; and a zealous, sure-footed practitioner of his form. Read More
April 8, 2016 The Revel Pictures from Our 2016 Spring Revel By Dan Piepenbring Lydia Davis Our Spring Revel was this Tuesday, and we have the pictures to prove it. Hundreds convened at Cipriani 42nd Street to honor Lydia Davis with the Hadada Award. She received it from her high school classmate Errol Morris—“We played in the high school orchestra together,” she explained, “and he played the cello, and I played the violin. And I don’t know how well he played the cello, but I know I didn’t play the violin very well. So we were promising young musicians together.” Morris expressed a particular fondness for her essay on translating Madame Bovary, calling it “one of my favorite things ever.” Davis’s speech was entirely improvised—or nearly entirely. She’d found herself “scrawling little notes in very small handwriting on a jiggling train” to New York, she said. Her husband, Alan Cote, attempted some encouragement, she told the crowd: “ ‘You know, Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address on the train.’ And I told him, Yes, that was probably easier.” John Guare took the stage to award Chris Bachelder the Terry Southern Prize for Humor. Bachelder regaled the crowd with a story of the Review’s fact-checking prowess—suffice to say he’ll never again forget which pole the penguins come from. (Hint: not the North Pole.) He told us, One of the paradoxes of the writing life is that, as you gain experience, you actually have fewer paths forward, and fewer habitable stances, and one stance that I find currently habitable is a kind of grave playfulness. And that’s a stance, among others, that The Paris Review supports and has always supported. And I think you can take that from a guy wearing a suit holding a model airplane. David Szalay received the Plimpton Prize for Fiction from Rachel Kushner. “He may be new to me, and to the pages of The Paris Review,” she said, “but he’s a fully developed writer, whose wisdom, skill, and precision, whose sardonic wit, all come through wonderfully, leaving no awkward seams of labor or vanity.” Take a look at the photos below—and we hope to see you next year! Photos by Clint Spaulding / © Patrick McMullan / PatrickMcMullan.com Read More
April 5, 2016 The Revel “In a House Besieged” By Roman Muradov Our Spring Revel is tonight. In anticipation of the event, the Daily is featuring a series of posts celebrating Lydia Davis, who is being honored this year with The Paris Review’s Hadada Award. Here, the illustrator Roman Muradov has adapted into comics Davis’s story “In a House Besieged,” which was originally published in the collection Break It Down (1986). Read More
March 31, 2016 The Revel “Odd Behavior” By Hallie Bateman Our Spring Revel is April 5. In anticipation of the event, the Daily is featuring a series of posts celebrating Lydia Davis, who is being honored this year with The Paris Review’s Hadada Award. Here, the cartoonist Hallie Bateman has adapted into comics Davis’s story “Odd Behavior,” which was originally published in the collection Almost No Memory (1997). Hallie Bateman is a writer and cartoonist based in Los Angeles.
March 29, 2016 The Revel “How Difficult” By Aidan Koch Our Spring Revel is April 5. In anticipation of the event, the Daily is featuring a series of posts celebrating Lydia Davis, who is being honored this year with The Paris Review’s Hadada Award. Here, the artist Aidan Koch has adapted into comics Davis’s story “How Difficult,” which was originally published in the collection Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001). Aidan Koch is a multimedia artist working in New York City. She has published several graphic novels, including The Blonde Woman, which won a Xeric Award, and Impressions. Her short comic story “Heavenly Seas” was featured in The Paris Review’s Summer 2015 issue. Her drawings are on view in the group show “Someday This Will Be Funny,’’ at Company in New York, through April 3.
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.