March 6, 2023 The Revel Announcing the 2023 George Plimpton and Susannah Hunnewell Prize Winners By The Paris Review Photograph of Harriet Clark by Joshua Conover; photograph of Ishion Hutchinson by Neil Watson. We are delighted to announce that on April 4, at our Spring Revel, Harriet Clark will receive the George Plimpton Prize, and the inaugural Susannah Hunnewell Prize will be presented to Ishion Hutchinson. The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993 by the editorial committee of our board of directors, recognizes an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the Review during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Yiyun Li, Ottessa Moshfegh, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Jonathan Escoffery, Eloghosa Osunde, and the 2022 winner, Chetna Maroo. Read More
March 3, 2023 The Review’s Review Three Favorite Lyricists By The Paris Review Three white-tailed deer. Courtesy of National Geographic. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I began listening to Wicca Phase Springs Eternal’s Full Moon Mystery Garden after I took two road trips through Death Valley, the first literal (in California) and the second figurative (in a hospital). So when I heard him say “On a mountain under full moon / I could say goodnight and mean it” and then “Another night I’m in the magic mirror / Another night engaged in seeing signs,” it felt like, well, a sign. Symbols, like mirrors, are roads to the other side; I have always been obsessed with looking for and in both. Though both of my trips actually happened, their allegorical affinity made them each less real, and harder, somehow, to return from. Seeing yourself through reflections can be a way of playing dead, of getting lost where you are not; in Full Moon Mystery Garden, it is also a way to get found. The album’s sigillic scenery is almost too familiar: black cat, black Polo, moon, mountain, mirror. But Wicca has an uncanny ability to show us what are basically gothic stock images under a strange new light, reanimating them. If similarly symbolically-hyperactive Bladee’s falsetto makes incantations out of normal nouns, Wicca’s hoarseness brings the otherworld to earth: rural Pennsylvania; Providence, Rhode Island. That’s magic, I guess—or music. Wicca’s older work is equally lyrically brilliant, but more claustrophobic: words are exchanged in bedrooms, in clubs, over text, in bad relationships. Now, he’s alone in a car looking out, “the twilight on repeat.” The album, which has four different songs with the word moon in the title, drives you along a kind of psychogeographic cul-de-sac, a looping map of road signs that seem to occur in too many places at once—the same way certain American towns all look the same, the way they all have a Main Street, a Crescent Street, and trees at their edges. Ex–emo teens will recognize the landscape. The album’s frequent refrain—“In one mile, turn left on Garden Avenue”—is spoken by a female GPS. Though he knows what road he’s on (“Dark Region Road”) and where he’s going (the “portal through the pines,” “Hickory Grove”), he still needs directions: a voice from elsewhere, an image out there that lets him recognize what he already knows. Funny how another person’s words can lead you gradually back to a place where your self and your world coincide—to life. “The meadow isn’t that far away,” and the mystery, meanwhile, is here. I was on a back road by myself In Waverly Township Totally immersed in where I was and what I felt Amazing how a simple drive Can open my eyes To what is out there —Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor Read More
February 24, 2023 The Review’s Review What Is This Video? Three Recommendations By The Paris Review Detail from the title sequence of Peter Chung’s Æon Flux. What is this video? A plot summary might run something like this: A low-quality cell phone records, in slow motion, a small suburban lake being stocked with fish. A long, transparent inflatable tube runs the fish from a truck across a lawn and into the lake. They get stuck; they struggle; they clog the tube; they swim, weakly, upstream; and eventually men in aprons (the fish stockers?) pick up the tube and force the last fish out. Neighbors (I presume) have gathered to watch the process—children are filming, a lone man reaches out piteously to stroke the clots of confused fish through the tube, and a goldendoodle’s fluffy head bobs in and out of the frame. The video, by the artist Barrett White, borrows its grand title—“Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”—from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and letters, in which that phrase describes the coexistence of apparently contradictory orientations to the world. White sets the video’s banal footage to Arvo Pärt’s solemn “Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten,” complete with periodically tolling bell. The video’s appeal is its constant oscillation between tragedy and, well, bathos. At first, the video seems like a funny TikTok—grand music, slo-mo, grainy vertical footage, silly suburban fish situation. Ha. But then it goes on for almost eight minutes? Just as Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” becomes a gorgeous and resigned dirge when slowed down (recommend), something about the dilation of time changes the tonality of White’s video. It creates space for an aesthetically sensible movement between the video’s contradictory tonal cues. This extension of time allows for multiple and layered juxtapositions of grand and banal. You can really feel this circulation when you’re watching it—feel the way your own feeling turns into its apparent opposite, and back. Read More
February 23, 2023 Bulletin The Review Wins the National Magazine Award for Fiction By The Paris Review Illustration by Na Kim. We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won the 2023 ASME Award for Fiction. The Review is also nominated in the category of general excellence, with the winner to be announced on March 28. Read the three prizewinning stories—“Trial Run” by Zach Williams, “Winter Term” by Michelle de Kretser, and “A Good Samaritan” by Addie E. Citchens—unlocked this week in celebration.
February 17, 2023 The Review’s Review My Ex Recommends By The Paris Review Mark Fenderson, An Idyl of St. Valentine’s Day, 1909. Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons. My first real lover was dumb, virile, hilarious—I didn’t trust a word he said. Certainly nothing he recommended. This is why, for years, I stayed away from his favorite book, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Until now. I’ve given in, and the epic Western is, predictably, blowing my mind, and, perhaps less predictably, my groin. I am never sure when carnage might strike—when I might find men whose naked bodies have been “roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes,” when I’ll come across a “charred coagulate” of bodies or a decapitated man whose severed neck “bubbles gently like a stew.” While reading, my muscles stay flexed. Blood pulses through dilated vessels. Awaiting climax, I am in a state of constant tension. Groin on vibrate. I never uncross my legs. This is reading as grotesque edging. Read More
February 10, 2023 The Review’s Review My Boyfriend Nietzsche and a Boy Like a Baked Alaska By The Paris Review Hans Olde, from “Der kranke Nietzsche” (“The ill Nietzsche”), June–August 1899. Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv Weimar. After two vodka tonics and a cosmo, my ninety-year-old grandmother lifts her glass and says, “But you know that Nietzsche is my boyfriend?” “He is?” “He’s my boyfriend.” It’s all right—we’ve shared boyfriends before. The actor Javier Bardem. Errol Louis, anchor at NY1. Her new neighbor. Her many doctors. She tells me that Nietzsche is her boyfriend because Nietzsche also hates the German composer Richard Wagner. I tell her Nietzsche hates a lot of people. She nods. “That’s good in a man.” Read More