{"id":162682,"date":"2022-12-06T10:30:48","date_gmt":"2022-12-06T15:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=162682"},"modified":"2022-12-06T10:20:18","modified_gmt":"2022-12-06T15:20:18","slug":"announcing-our-winter-issue-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/12\/06\/announcing-our-winter-issue-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing Our Winter Issue"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Friends sometimes ask me why I still bother going to the theater. It\u2019s a fair question. Most of the time, I\u2019ll mention a play only to complain about it at length\u2014the pretentious set design, the hammy performances, the man in the audience who laughed very loudly to show that he\u2019d understood the joke. Does any other art form have such a low hit rate? Yet I persist, because of the few plays that manage, in some way, to alter me\u2014and on those rare occasions when they do, the years of disappointment only heighten my elation.<\/p>\n

Our new Winter issue is not actually devoted to the theater, but several of the pieces we chose do capture the same miraculous thrill I experience when plays go right. There is, for instance, Isabella Hammad\u2019s \u201cGertrude<\/strong><\/a>,\u201d in which a London actor finds herself part of a troupe putting on\u00a0Hamlet<\/em>\u00a0in the West Bank. You\u2019ll also find an\u00a0excerpt<\/strong><\/a> from Old Actress, <\/em>a new play by Lucas Hnath. It\u2019s set in the living room of a woman who is struggling to memorize her lines for a production of a play called\u00a0Death Tax<\/em>\u00a0(also by Hnath) and who has enlisted a younger and far less successful actor to help her learn them. On the page, the script\u2019s dialogue looks worryingly avant-garde\u2014the punctuation and spacing are a copyeditor\u2019s nightmare. But read aloud\u2014my deputy, Lidija, and I tried it, surreptitiously, in my office\u2014it is almost eerily naturalistic, such that you wonder why some playwrights pretend people speak in perfect paragraphs.
\n
\nAs Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn tells Belinda McKeon in a new\u00a0Art of Fiction<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0interview\u2014in which he also discusses the uses of trauma and his hatred of the pluperfect\u2014writing a first draft can feel as alarming and adrenalized as any live performance. In preparing to write the\u00a0part of Nora Webster\u00a0<\/em> in which Nora thinks she\u2019s seen her dead husband, T\u00f3ib\u00edn spent several days alone at his County Wexford home, reading other works in which ghosts appear. Then, one morning, he got up early and put Beethoven\u2019s\u00a0Archduke Trio<\/em>\u00a0on repeat. \u201cI knew it could only be written in one go,\u201d\u00a0he says. \u201cI had to get every moment of it down as though it were happening in real time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reading certain short stories can feel like watching a dangerous solo sport; I\u2019m drawn to the ones that stay on course even as they remind me how easy it would be to crash that Alpine A522. So it is with Sophie Madeline Dess\u2019s troubling \u201cZalmanovs<\/strong><\/a>\u201d; Addie E. Citchens\u2019s brilliant, unruly \u201cA Good Samaritan<\/strong><\/a>\u201d; and Avigayl Sharp\u2019s \u201cUncontrollable, Irrelevant<\/strong><\/a>,\u201d a bravura portrait of frenetic self-absorption.<\/p>\n

Also in this issue: an\u00a0Art of Poetry<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0interview with N. Scott Momaday, our 2021 Hadada Award winner; portfolios by\u00a0Lily van der Stokker<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Mary Manning<\/strong><\/a>; and poems\u2014selected by our new poetry editor, Srikanth \u201cChicu\u201d Reddy\u2014by\u00a0C. S. Giscombe<\/strong><\/a>,\u00a0Timmy Straw<\/strong><\/a>,\u00a0Cynthia Cruz<\/strong><\/a>,\u00a0and Victoria Chang<\/strong><\/a>. What\u2019s nice about reading is that you don\u2019t need a ticket, you can do it in bed, and there are no shoddy performances. As Jung once said, in the theater of dreams, the dreamer plays every role.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cFor me and my colleagues at the Review, the excitement of reading a short story can be akin to watching a dangerous solo sport.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":309,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[5301,67827,68455,31814,44,1445],"class_list":["post-162682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-letter-from-the-editor","tag-colm-toibin","tag-featured","tag-letter-from-the-editor","tag-n-scott-momaday","tag-theater","tag-winter-issue"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAnnouncing Our Winter Issue by Emily Stokes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"December 6, 2022 \u2013 \u201cFor me and my colleagues at the Review, the excitement of reading a short story can be akin to watching a dangerous solo sport.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/12\/06\/announcing-our-winter-issue-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Announcing Our Winter Issue by Emily Stokes\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 6, 2022 \u2013 \u201cFor me and my colleagues at the Review, the excitement of reading a short story can be akin to watching a dangerous solo sport.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/12\/06\/announcing-our-winter-issue-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2022-12-06T15:30:48+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/tpr-242-broadside-newsletter-carousel-white-scaled.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2560\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"2560\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Emily Stokes\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Emily Stokes\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/12\/06\/announcing-our-winter-issue-2\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/12\/06\/announcing-our-winter-issue-2\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Emily Stokes\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/17ae163378e9f7c669946dd3a3fa9317\"},\"headline\":\"Announcing Our Winter Issue\",\"datePublished\":\"2022-12-06T15:30:48+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/12\/06\/announcing-our-winter-issue-2\/\"},\"wordCount\":553,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/12\/06\/announcing-our-winter-issue-2\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/tpr-242-broadside-newsletter-carousel-white-1024x1024.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Colm Toibin\",\"Featured\",\"letter from the editor\",\"N. 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