TOBI'S DESK

On April 12,  The Paris Review  announced N. Scott Momaday as  the recipient of the 2021 Hadada Award , presented each year to a “distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” To honor the multifariousness of Momaday’s achievements, the Daily is publishing a series of short essays devoted to his work. Today, Julian Brave NoiseCat places Momaday’s work in conversation with the past half century of Indigenous activism it has paralleled. Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday at his Santa Fe studio with old family photos. Photographed on Thursday, February 6, 2020. Photo: Adolphe Pierre-Louis/ Albuquerque Journal / ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News. The year was 1968, it was finals season at UC Berkeley, and LaNada War Jack (neé Means) sat in the way back of the auditorium, about two hundred or so students perched between her and her professor, N. Scott Momaday. Momaday was just wrapping one of the last lectures of the quarter i

Every week, the editors of  The Paris Review  lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by  signing up for the Redux newsletter . Phillips in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 2018. Photo courtesy of Reston Allen. This week at The Paris Review , we’re highlighting the work of queer and trans writers in our archive in honor of Pride. Read on for Carl Phillips’s Art of Poetry interview , Jeanette Winterson’s short story “ The Lives of Saints ,” Timothy Liu’s poem “ Action Painting ,” and a selection of diary entries by Jan Morris. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review ? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, choose our new bundle and you’ll also receive Poets at Work for 25% off the cover price.   Carl Phillips, The Art of Poetry No. 103 I

Photo: Edward Friedman. Clare Sestanovich’s short story “ By Design ,” which first appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of this magazine, features the unforgettable Suzanne, a woman facing accusations of sexual harassment, going through a divorce, and struggling to accept her adult son’s independent life. In the opening tableau, she sits across from her future daughter-in-law at a restaurant. Suzanne keeps her criticism of the impending marriage to herself but outwardly betrays a deep, unspoken malaise. She consumes an entire basket of bread by soaking each bite in red wine, as if gorging on the sacrament. In Objects of Desire , which includes the story, Sestanovich revitalizes James Joyce’s style of “scrupulous meanness”—depicting the setting and inhabitants of her narratives in an ultrarealistic, if sometimes unforgiving, light. Moments of epiphany, or at least self-understanding, accompany everyday activities. Suzanne, for example, finds solace not in a major dramatic resolution b

Georg Pencz, Samson and Delilah , ca. 1500–1550, engraving, 1 7/8 × 3 1/8’’. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I The ships landed on the beaches of Normandy before dawn. Along eighty kilometers of coastline, amphibious vessels slid out of the water like sea monsters and shook themselves dry, flinging off their damp bodies thousands of men smeared with the same euphoria of war. Insatiable, the beach seemed to de­vour the troops. Aircrafts helped feed the assault from the sky: one by one, the soldiers surrendered themselves to flight, to the allure of the fall. Their jellyfish silhouettes—ephemeral but perfect for slipping through the air—negotiated gravity until the feel of the sand returned to them the animal weight of their bodies. The landings lasted more than a month and with them the war was near its end. No seaborne invasion has ever equaled that of the Allies on the coast of France. Following the tides of the English Channel, armies from all over the world gathered to fr

Hazel Jane Plante. Photo: Agatha K. Courtesy of Metonymy Press. Just as there are an infinite number of stories to be told, there are an infinite number of ways to tell a story. Take Hazel Jane Plante’s Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) as case in point. When the narrator’s best friend dies, she decides to write an encyclopedia about her friend’s favorite television show. While Plante’s novel takes the form of an A-to-Z guide to the fictional one-season TV series Little Blue , it also tells the story of a queer trans woman mourning the loss of her straight trans best friend, for whom she felt an overwhelming, unrequited love. Through her thorough examination of the show, the narrator creates a beautiful, holistic homage to Vivian’s life. At the end of Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) , I found myself in awe of the book’s author. Not only has Plante imagined an incredibly complex TV show from scratch, she’s written an entire encyclopedia about said show, and somehow told a

Photo: Charlotte Brooks. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. RL Goldberg’s 2018 essay “ Toward Creating a Trans Literary Canon ” offers up a list of phenomenal trans writing: Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride , a truly life-changing book; Leslie Feinberg’s utterly devastating Stone Butch Blues ; and one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing, Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl . But it is Goldberg’s explanation of the ethos behind the list to which I keep returning: “It’s not a canon exactly, but a corpus. It’s something more like a body: mutable, evolving, flexible, open, exposed, exposing. It’s the opposite of erasure; it’s an inscription.” To celebrate Pride in my capacity as intern here at The Paris Review , I’ve been reading works by the queer authors in the latest issues of the magazine. The archive contains a myriad of fantastic queer writers, but I wanted to recognize some of our contemporary contributors, folks whose work has appeared in our most recent pag

For close to seven decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers—John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mary Jo Bang, and Solmaz Sharif, among many others—have gone on to become leading voices in their generations. This year’s competition received close to a thousand submissions, which were read by preliminary judges Julia Guez and Timothy Donnelly. After much deliberating, final judges Rick Barot, Patricia Spears Jones, and Mónica de la Torre awarded this year’s prizes to Kenzie Allen, Ina Cariño, Mag Gabbert, and Alexandra Zukerman. The runners-ups were Walter Ancarrow, Hannah Loeb, Dāshaun Washington, and JinJin Xu. The four winners receive five hundred dollars, publication on The Paris Review Daily , a stay at the Ace Hotel and a reading at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center in the fall of 2021. We’re pleased to present their work below.

In her monthly column  The Moon in Full , Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Watercolor illustration from Aurora consurgens , a fifteenth-century alchemical text. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Summer now, and the petals are wet in the morning. The moon was born four and a half billion years ago. It’s been goddess, god, sister, bridge, vessel, mother, lover, other. “Civilisations still fight / Over your gender,” writes Priya Sarukkai Chabria. Dew is one of its daughters—or so the Spartan lyric poet Alcman had it in the mid-seventh-century B.C. : “Dew, a child of moon and air / causes the deergrass to grow.” Cyrano de Bergerac, twenty-three hundred years later, imagined a dew-fueled way of getting to the moon. “I planted myself in the middle of a great many Glasses full of Dew, tied fast above me,” he writes in his satirical A Voyage to the Moon , published in 1657. If dew rises

This past week, the extended Paris Review family gathered online to celebrate the launch of the Summer 2021 issue . If you weren’t able to tune in, you can watch a recording of the event below. You’ll see Kenan Orhan reading from his story “ The Beyoğlu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra ,” Ada Limón reading her poem “ Power Lines ,” and Kaveh Akbar reading his poems “ An Oversight ” and “ Famous Americans and Why They Were Wrong .”     There’s more where that came from: check out the rest of the Summer 2021 issue now. And if you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe ! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives. from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/3vW6jYd