May 2016

Eve Gleichman Wins 2016 KR Short Fiction Contest!

Congratulations to Eve Gleichman, winner of the ninth annual Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest! Gleichman’s story “Butter,” selected from more than 430 entries by judge Jaimy Gordon, will be published in the Jan/Feb 2017 issue of the Kenyon Review. Gleichman will also receive a scholarship to attend the KR Writers Workshop. Click here for runners-up and honorable mention.

Why We Chose (to Do) It (Again):
Nature’s Nature

BY DAVID BAKER, POETRY EDITOR

“Nature’s Nature” is not, of course, a single work or even several works by a single poet. It is a suite of thirty-one poems and one lyric essay gathered around the subject, location, and occasion of the “natural.” This is our second such installment with an explicit focus on nature, and I am pleased to note that this will now be an annual offering, each May/June, in the Kenyon Review. I can think of no more necessary focus for our writing and reading than to consider the environmental—and fundamental—challenges we face. Each year’s feature will present poets and writers not included in previous iterations of “Nature’s Nature,” so I hope we continue to grow in two ways at the same time, becoming an increasingly rich palette of aesthetic and cultural stances and an increasingly focused expression of creative concern. Continue reading “Why We Chose It.”

Hilary Mantel to Receive 2016 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement

Hilary Mantel, who has created a literary phenomenon with her most recent novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, has been selected as this year’s winner of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. Mantel has been widely praised for vivid prose, dazzling images, and characterization that works its way deep into our imagination. The award will be presented at the KR gala on November 3 in New York City. On November 5, Mantel will visit Gambier to give the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture at the Kenyon Review Literary Festival.

Introducing The James Wright Award for Nature Writing

We’re pleased to announce our newest award: The James Wright Award for Nature Writing, to be awarded annually by KR in association with The Nature Conservancy to a book of prose or poetry of surpassing literary insight into the human relationship with nature and the environment. The award is named for Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Wright, a 1952 graduate of Kenyon College and a Kenyon Review author. This year’s inaugural award will be presented to Andrea Wulf for The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World at the KR gala on November 3.

May/June 2016: The Nature Issue is Now Out!

Don’t miss the latest issue of KR featuring “Nature’s Nature,” a bountiful special section serving up thirty-one poems and an essay pondering the natural world, edited and introduced by Poetry Editor David Baker. Also in this issue, enjoy provocative new fiction by Gregory Spatz, Catherine Brady, and Rion Amilcar Scott and engaging nonfiction from Rebecca McClanahan. Look for the issue in your mailbox, on newsstands, and in bookstores, or read it on our new app! Don’t have our free app? Download it today!

New in KR Podcasts

Daniel Torday, award-winning novelist (The Flight of Poxl West) and former KR book review editor, talks with consulting editor Andy Grace about the line between fiction and nonfiction, how his debut novel set in WWII is based partly on family history, why he left a job at Esquire to pursue his career as a novelist, and the current state of book review culture. Listen to it!

From KROnline: A Shirt Loves a Body

BY JOSEPH CAMPANA

A shirt loves a body the way
a bracelet kisses a wrist, kisses
the tender flesh stretched over
tendon and vein: a whole world
thrumming just below. Fingers
love motion the way the flesh
loves the deep electrical twitch
of the body involuntary, satisfied
with itself and one at last with
a music that loves to fill a room
the way a piano loves Liberace
and Victor Borge. . . .

Finish reading this poem on KROnline.

The World’s Fair

BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

From The Kenyon Review, Autumn 1948, Vol. X, No. 4

Composed shortly after The Great Gatsby came out, Fitzgerald’s story “The World’s Fair” was an early treatment of material he would eventually transform into Tender is the Night (1934); the character of Francis Melarkey became the novel’s Rosemary Hoyt, and Seth and Dinah Piper were early versions of Dick and Nicole Diver. The story ran posthumously in The Kenyon Review in 1948, the same year that Malcolm Cowley brought out a revised and radically reordered version of Tender Is the Night based on notes that Fitzgerald had completed before he died. Cowley included “The World’s Fair” under a different title as an appendix to his edition of the novel.

All that afternoon Francis knew that part of Dinah wanted to be rid of him, to be swiftly busy with her own affairs. She was short in her speech when he went with her persistently to a milliner’s shop and she made him wait outside; he spent the time gazing at a miniature of the battlefields in the window of a tourist office. There was dust gathered on the tangle of tiny tree trunks, wrecked toy tanks, broken caissons, and roofless doll houses marked Verdun, Côté 304, Cambrai, and the panorama seemed as old as the war itself; it depressed him as it lay baking and fading in the sun. Continue reading this story.

From the KR Blog: Trauma Privilege

BY SEJAL SHAH

April 17, 2016

It was November 8, 2015, at 11:09 p.m. I know because I took a screenshot. In a Facebook group I moderate of 200 local writers, a woman addressed a post to me, my first name spelled out in capital letters to make sure I would not miss it . . . Read the blog post.

A Micro-Conversation with Gökçenur Ç.

Gökçenur Ç.’s poem “Rules of Making Love” appeared in the Mar/Apr 2016 issue of the Kenyon Review and can be read here.

What was your original impetus for writing “Rules of Making Love”?

In the beginning I had the image of a man who thinks time is not passing. He feels like time is passing very slowly and as it passes, it grinds him. He thinks before he separated from his lover, time used to pass over them without touching like a herd of bees. All started with that image. Read the full interview.

MAY 2016
CONTENTS
SFC Winner
Why We Chose It
Hilary Mantel Honored
James Wright Award
May/June 2016 issue
KR Podcast
From KROnline
From the Archive
From the Blog
KR Conversations

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