March 3, 2015 The Revel Atticus Lish Wins Plimpton Prize; Mark Leyner Wins Terry Southern Prize By The Paris Review Left, Atticus Lish; right, Mark Leyner Each year, at our Spring Revel, the board of The Paris Review awards two prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine. It is with great pleasure that we announce our 2015 honorees. 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 Hilary Mantel to Atticus Lish for his story “Jimmy,” from issue 210—an excerpt from his novel Preparation for the Next Life. The Terry Southern Prize is a $5,000 award honoring “humor, wit, and sprezzatura” in work from either The Paris Review or the Daily. Perhaps best known as the screenwriter behind Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider, Terry Southern was also a satirical novelist, a pioneering New Journalist, and a driving force behind the early Paris Review. This year’s prize will be presented by Donald Antrim to Mark Leyner for “Gone with the Mind,” a story from our new Spring issue. Hearty congratulations from all of us on staff! (And if you haven’t bought your ticket to attend the Revel—supporting the magazine and writers you love—isn’t this the time?)
May 6, 2014 The Revel The What Will Save You Factor By John Jeremiah Sullivan At our Spring Revel last month, John Jeremiah Sullivan presented the Hadada Award to Frederick Seidel. Sullivan’s remarks follow, along with three of Seidel’s poems, which were read aloud that night: “Downtown,” read by Zadie Smith; “Frederick Seidel,” read by Martin Amis; and “The Night Sky,” read by Uma Thurman. As a kind of offsite, ersatz staff member at The Paris Review, I claim the pleasure both of thanking you all for your presence here, and of thanking everyone at the Review—Lorin, and the board, and my colleagues there—for giving me the honor of announcing this award. I don’t think I’ve ever used the word honor in a less glib manner. When you are in your twenties and living in the city, or any city, or anywhere, and trying to write, there are poets whose work will come to mean something to you beyond pleasure, beyond even whatever we have in mind when we use the word inspiration, and into the arena of survival, into what the poet whose work we are celebrating tonight describes as the “what will save you factor.” When I was in my twenties and living in New York, the poet who came to mean that for me and a lot of the other younger writers and editors I knew was one named Frederick Seidel, a poet who had come, like another we’d heard about, from St. Louis via Harvard, and from there, via everywhere. Read More
April 11, 2014 The Revel Relive the Revel By Dan Piepenbring Pause Play Play Prev | Next We’re still recovering from Tuesday’s Revel, where some five hundred people gathered to honor Frederick Seidel with the Hadada Award, presented by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Lydia Davis presented Emma Cline with the Plimpton Prize for Fiction; Roz Chast presented the Terry Southern Prize for Humor to Ben Lerner; and Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, and Uma Thurman all read from Seidel’s work. We could say a good time was had by all, but why not let the pictures tell the tale? It was a spectacular evening. You can read accounts of the fun from Page Six, Women’s Wear Daily, and Guest of a Guest. Be sure to take a look at all the photos here, too. See you next year! Photos by Clint Spaulding / © Patrick McMullan / PatrickMcMullan.com
April 8, 2014 Seidelathon “Arabia” By Dan Piepenbring Tonight, at our Spring Revel, we’ll honor Frederick Seidel with the Hadada Award. In the weeks leading up the Revel, we’ve been looking back at the work Seidel has published in The Paris Review throughout his career. A sunset in Zanzibar. Photo: hobbs_luton, via Wikimedia Commons When I first read “Arabia,” which appeared in our Summer 2011 issue, I was sitting on a rickety chair looking out at Lake Michigan. It was a gorgeous day in late June, a twenty-one-year-old cat was asleep at my feet, and I’d just started to sweat in the sun when I read the poem’s first lines: I move my body meat smell next to yours, Your spice of Zanzibar. Mine rains, yours pours— Sex tropics as a way to not be dead. I don’t know who we are except in bed. This was before I’d read much of Seidel’s work, and these lines felt outrageous to me, especially that long row of monosyllables, “as a way to not be dead.” It was the perfect poem to read on a summer vacation—as long as it went on, I was living in a kind of lewd Zanzibar of the the mind. With its ostentatious rhymes (Labia with Arabia), its nods and winks to the politics of the day (“The president of the United States / Is caught between those two tectonic plates, / Republicans and Democrats”) and its flagrantly oversexed images (a cowboy sipping honey from a pair of sweet lips), “Arabia” now reads to me like vintage Seidel—the way it forces the visceral and the bodily to coexist with the elegant, the faint taunt that comes in a line like “I’m happy staring at what makes me stare.” It also contains what you might read as an incidental summary of Seidel’s poetics: “It’s politics, it’s tropics, and it’s warm.” (And it is, like sex tropics, a great way not to be dead.) After that first stanza, it continues: I’ll tell you someone I’m not happy with—But no I won’t. I won’t destroy the myth.The president of the United StatesIs caught between those two tectonic plates, Republicans and Democrats, the nudeAlternatives to naked solitude.It’s politics, it’s tropics, and it’s warmEnough to arm the sunrise with a car alarm That’s going off and starts the earthquake shakeAnd shiver, shiver, of the sobbing steak.O sweet tectonic fault line and sweet lipsExuding honey that the cowboy sips. Read the whole poem here.
March 25, 2014 Seidelathon “For Holly Andersen” By Lorin Stein On April 8, at our Spring Revel, we’ll honor Frederick Seidel with the Hadada Award. In the weeks leading up the Revel, we’re looking at Seidel’s poems. Bemelman’s Bar in the Carlyle Hotel, New York. Photo: Arvind Grover Over the weekend, I turned on Studio 360. A cardiologist was describing the health benefits of dance—and this cardiologist was none other than Holly Andersen, hero of a great poem by Frederick Seidel, from his 2006 collection, Ooga-Booga. Dr. Andersen is also the dedicatee of the poem. I guess you could say she is its muse, but hero is the better word. This is a poem about heroism: doing your job in the face of death. It happens also to be a love poem, for in Seidel’s work love and admiration are rarely far apart. I never have a drink at the Carlyle Hotel without thinking of the first lines, and I think of the last lines much more often than that. Seidel has never given a public reading, but he has made several recordings of his poems, including this one. I played it as soon as the segment was over. What could be more pleasant than talking about people dying,And doctors really trying,On a winter afternoonAt the Carlyle Hotel, in our cocoon?We also will be dying one day soon. Dr. Holly Anderson has a vodka cosmopolitan,And has another, and becomes positively Neapolitan,The moon warbling a song about the sun,Sitting on a sofa at the Carlyle,Staying stylishly alive for a while. Her spirited lovelinessDoes cause some distress.She makes my urbanity undress.I present symptoms that expressAn underlying happiness in the face of the beautiful emptiness. She lost a very sick patient she especially cared about.The man died on the table. It wasn’t a matter of feeling any guilt or doubt.Something about a doctor who can cure, or anyway try,But can also cry,Is some sort of ultimate lullaby, and lie.
March 18, 2014 Seidelathon Flame By Dan Piepenbring On April 8, at our Spring Revel, we’ll honor Frederick Seidel with the Hadada Award. In the weeks leading up the Revel, we’re looking back at the work Seidel has published in The Paris Review throughout his career. Photo: Shreyas Joshi, via Wikimedia Commons “Flame” appeared in our Spring 1981 issue, which included stories by Faulkner, Carver, and Gass; poems by Amiri Baraka and Maxine Kumin, both of whom died earlier this year; and an interview with Rebecca West. With its images of fireflies, moonlight, and waves, the poem finds Seidel at his most earnest; a muted sadness, almost romantic, permeates “Flame,” which is devoid of the wry, lacerating ironies that usually mark his work. And it finishes with one of the most quietly perceptive descriptions of, well, a flame that I can remembering encountering. Here, best to read it for yourself; the poem is more beautiful than any writing about it will be. The honey, the humming of a million bees,In the middle of Florence pining for Paris;The whining trembling the cars and trucks humCrossing the metal matting of Brooklyn BridgeWhen you stand below it on the Brooklyn side—High above you, the harp, the cathedral, the hive—In the middle of Florence. Florence in flames.Like waking from a fever … it is evening.Fireflies breathe in the gardens on Bellosguardo.And then the moon steps from the cypresses andA wave of feeling breaks, phosphorescent—Moonlight, a wave hushing on a beach.In the dark, a flame goes out. And thenThe afterimage of a flame goes out. Buy your ticket to the Revel here.