The Paris Review’s mission has always been a dual one: to provide a platform for great literature, and to inspire readers with ambitious new writing. I’m proud that we’ve been able to accomplish both during my time at the
Review, and I would like to thank the writers, readers, and colleagues on staff and the board who have collaborated with me toward these objectives
. The project of the
Review is an ongoing one seven decades strong but over the past three years, I’m particularly proud of a few accomplishments: I’m thrilled to see the quarterly at record high circulation, and that the work we publish in its pages has been recognized by peers, including the 2020 American Society of Magazine Editors’ Award for Fiction and the 2021 volume of
Ana Božičević, Ken Chen, Craig Morgan Teicher
Welcome to the final installment of this year s poetry preview. I d like to thank Ana, Ken, Evie, and Phillip for joining me this year and bringing their unique sensibilities to this glimpse into the future. Our collective picks for the must-read poetry books of the coming year (don t forget to check out parts one and two of the preview) show, among other things, the incredible capaciousness of contemporary poetry.
I ve never felt the urgent need for that breadth and diversity as I do now, as I struggle as all of us are struggling to understand the chaos of the last four years and look, with as much hope as we can muster, toward an uncertain horizon. May these books be sustaining company for you as they have been for us. And stay safe! Craig Morgan Teicher
A strange turn occurs toward the middle of Frederick Seidel’s 2009
Paris Review interview. The poet, whom Adam Kirsch once deemed the best in the United States, describes himself as coming late to an appreciation of New York School poets James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara. Until this point in the conversation, Seidel’s distinctive sensibility snapped into place commensurate with his biography. His patrician vocabulary and profoundly conservative sense of rhyme and meter gestured toward his Harvard education and his Sorbonne classes at midcentury. Visits to Ezra Pound in 1953 (who at the time was institutionalized and warding off a treason charge for his radio broadcasts in support of Hitler and Italian fascism during World War II) and T.S. Eliot (a fellow St. Louis native who, through talent and a penchant for self-invention, acted out an Anglophile’s version of what a poet should be) taught Seidel that achievement didn’t lie solely in a moralist’s idea of virtue and that
December 14, 2020
Emergence Magazine is a quarterly online publication exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Each issue explores a theme through innovative digital media, as well as the written and spoken word. The
Emergence Magazine podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories, and more.
As a chemical plant in St. James Parish, Louisiana, threatens a majority Black community with toxic emissions, Boyce Upholt looks deeply at the nature of air and considers how it can challenge the often white ideal of the wild as a place of escape.