October 11, 2023 Bulletin Tobias Wolff Will Receive Our 2024 Hadada Award By The Paris Review Photograph by Elena Seibert. In an interview published in The Paris Review no. 171 (Fall 2004), Tobias Wolff pinpointed the radical power of a well-written story. “Good stories slip past our defenses—we all want to know what happens next—and then slow time down, and compel our interest and belief in other lives than our own, so that we feel ourselves in another presence. It’s a kind of awakening, a deliverance, it cracks our shell and opens us up to the truth and singularity of others—to their very being.” The Paris Review has always sought out just this kind of writing, of which Wolff’s own body of work is an extraordinary example. We are thrilled to honor him with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature. Previous recipients include Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Lydia Davis, Jamaica Kincaid, and Vivian Gornick. Read More
October 10, 2023 Car Crushes Alpine White BMW M4 Convertible, Fiona Red Leather Interior By Sophie Madeline Dess BMW of Mountain View Geniuses, “Tour the 2023 M4 Competition xDrive Convertible in Alpine White | 4K.” “I want to wrap / my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral down / a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo,” writes Olivia Sokolowski in her poem “Lover of Cars,” which appears in the new Fall issue of the Review. And who doesn’t, when you put it like that? In celebration of Sokolowski’s poem, we’ve commissioned writers to reflect briefly on cars they’ve loved, struggled with, coveted, and crushed on. I am not only a horrible driver but also a very confident one. I’ve never owned a car. I shouldn’t. Yet I’ve got an unaccountable and unyielding desire for a vehicle I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen. I want—have always wanted, with an impractical seriousness that astounds me—an Alpine White BMW M4 two-seater convertible with a perforated Fiona Red leather interior. I can’t help myself. I want to get inside one so bad, and I want to ride it so slow, and I want to ride it fast, and I want to feel my feet thrill at being suspended only 120 mm above ground, at the threat of my toes being shredded into pavement. I want to park it and feel the brutal throb of my revving. I want to feel the car’s restraint, for to drive it at all is to tame it—it’s to feel 503 horses latent in the softest touch of gas. Read More
October 10, 2023 On Poetry Making of a Poem: Olivia Sokolowski on “Lover of Cars” By Olivia Sokolowski An alternate ending to “Lover of Cars.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Olivia Sokolowski’s “Lover of Cars” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 245. How did writing the first draft feel to you? I’ve been into cars since I was around fifteen and daydreaming of nineties Jaguars, but somehow, I’d never written much about them. Along the I-75 last winter, noticing and cataloguing the steady stream of cars along the meridian, I decided it was time to convert my obsession into a poetic one. Prompts are normally tough for me—I feel put on the spot and all my good images flee. But when I set out to write about cars, the task-poem turned out far better than I imagined. Perhaps because the topic is so rich—cars not only engage all of our senses but are also thoroughly ingrained in our cultural and personal histories. I surprised myself with the veer toward a family/coming-of-age narrative. The more luxurious bits, like dreaming of an otherworldly Audi or joyriding through Cinque Terre, were just plain fun to write. I lived vicariously through my speaker. Read More
October 6, 2023 The Review’s Review Dare to Leave a Trace: On A City of Sadness By Michelle Kuo Yidingmu Police Station, Taipei, the morning of February 28, 1947. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989) was digitally restored and rereleased in theaters across Taiwan earlier this year. Running two hours and thirty-seven minutes, the melancholic art-house film shows in painstaking detail the dissolution of a Taiwanese family prompted by political regime change following World War II. In 1945, the Japanese surrendered Taiwan; soon after, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang party (KMT) would retreat from China to the island, violently suppress native uprisings, and officially claim the island as its own in 1949. “This island is so pitiful. First the Japanese and then the Chinese. They all rule us but none take care of us,” one of the film’s protagonists says in Taiwanese, a language that the KMT banned from schools. The English subtitles were less subtle: “They all exploit us and no one gives a damn.” Read More
October 5, 2023 Eat Your Words Cooking with Madame d’Aulnoy By Valerie Stivers Photograph by Erica Maclean. The fairy tales of Mary-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Baronesse d’Aulnoy—first published in French in the 1690s—are full of jewel-like foods, poisoned drinks, and violent feats of baking. The cooking is extreme. In one story, “Finette-Cendron,” a Cinderella figure, pleases her fairy godmother by baking her a cake with “two pounds of butter”; later, she serves her a feast made from two chickens, a cock, and “two little rabbits that were being fed up with cabbage.” In another story, “Belle-Belle,” a cross-dressing girl kills a dragon after getting him drunk on a lake-sized wine cocktail spiced with “raisins, pepper, and other things that cause thirst.” In a third, “The Bee and the Orange Tree,” a princess brings her shipwrecked sweetheart “four parrots and six squirrels cooked in the sun,” along with “strawberries, cherries, raspberries, and other fruit,” served on plates of stone, and using large, “very soft and pliable” leaves as napkins. Lest anyone find d’Aulnoy’s repasts and their power unrealistic, the opposite is true, as I discovered while attempting to re-create the food with my friend Celia Bell, whose novel, The Disenchantment, published this May, was inspired by d’Aulnoy’s life and work. Read More
October 4, 2023 On Painting Beginning with Color: An Interview with Etel Adnan By Laure Adler Photograph courtesy of Nightboat Books. She would say that driving a big car on a highway crossing the American desert was like doing calligraphy in her notebooks. She said that if you look at a mountain carefully and faithfully each day, you can become its friend. And this is what happened to her. Each thing that existed in the world provoked her curiosity, and often her wonder. She was never weary and always alert, as if to be alive were in itself such a stroke of luck that nothing must be let go of. She loved wild buttercups and blood-red anemones. She was friends with the flowers too. Born in 1925 in Beirut, Etel Adnan was a poet and an artist. (A portfolio of her work appeared in the Review in 2018.) She died in Paris in 2021. I met her nine years ago in somewhat worldly circumstances, surrounded by famous artists and important gallerists. Everyone was talking but her. She had planted herself with her back to the crowd, facing an enormous fireplace. And she watched the fire without moving. She watched it with such intensity I didn’t dare approach her. I had read some of her writing: remarkable poems, and an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist that had impressed me with her point of view on the world. Here was an artist, to be sure, but as young people say these days, “not just that.” It was this “not just” that I wanted to understand. I first came to Etel to ask questions. Very soon I was coming back to see her, to be with her, to be in the delight of being with her. Read More