October 2016

Hilary Mantel and Andrea Wulf to Receive Awards at KR Dinner on November 3rd

The Kenyon Review has selected Hilary Mantel as the winner of the 2016 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. A master literary artist of our generation, Hilary Mantel has created a cultural phenomenon in her most recent novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. New this year, Andrea Wulf will receive the inaugural James Wright Award for Nature Writing given jointly by the Review and the Nature Conservancy. Wulf brings to life the extraordinary Alexander von Humboldt, the visionary who first demonstrated the organic connection binding together all aspects of the natural world. Join us if you can for an unforgettable gala evening at the Rainbow Room in New York City on November 3rd, when Mantel and Wulf will accept their Kenyon Review awards. Reserve tickets for the awards dinner here.

Why We Chose It

BY GEETA KOTHARI, NONFICTION EDITOR

“The Great Unknown,” by Ravi Mangla, appears in the Fall 2016 Poetics of Science issue of KROnline.

A third of the way through his elegant and compact essay “The Great Unknown,” Ravi Mangla’s observes, “The mail, once good for a mystery or two, can be followed with a handy tracking number.” This seemingly innocuous line at once captures the tone and essence of the essay. Every advancement in technology or science results in a gain and a loss, but the epigraph of “The Great Unknown” suggests something much more profound and troubling than the delivery of Amazon packages. “When too much light falls on everything, a special terror results,” Annie Dillard writes. How much light is too much? At what point does the satisfaction of knowing an answer to a question undermine the pleasure of its mystery? Continue reading “Why We Chose It.”

Knox Reads! Wolf Hall

KR launched this year’s Knox Reads! initiative by giving away free copies of the masterful novel Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, winner of the 2016 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. Copies of the book were distributed this week at the Mount Vernon Farmers’ Market and at Finn House, with a third giveaway to take place this Friday at Paragraphs Bookstore. Throughout the month Kenyon College faculty will lead discussions of the novel and its historical context on campus and at the Mount Vernon Public Library. Also in October, the Kenyon College Bookstore is sponsoring “Erasures at the Bookstore,” weekly contests in which participants are invited to create erasures from passages of Wolf Hall. Rounding out the October festivities: screenings of the six-part Wolf Hall miniseries! Check out the full slate of Knox Reads! events here.

Submit to the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers

The fourteenth annual Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers will begin accepting entries in November. The prize, which is open to high school sophomores and juniors throughout the world, is juried by Natalie Shapero, editor at large. Learn more about the contest.

KR Reading Period closes November 1st

The Kenyon Review will continue accepting online submissions through November 1, 2016. This year’s earlier deadline is intended to make the process fairer, helping to ensure that earlier and later submissions stand the same chance at publication in the Kenyon Review or KROnline. Short fiction, poetry, drama, essays, and translations will be accepted for both the magazine and KROnline from a single pool of online submissions. Click here to access our submission guidelines.

Save the Dates: 2017 Summer Writing Workshops

JUNE 17-24, 2017
Fiction: Lee K. Abbott, E.J. Levy, Nancy Zafris
Nonfiction: Rebecca McClanahan, Dinty Moore
Poetry: David Baker, Joanna Klink, Carl Phillips

JULY 8-15, 2017
Fiction: Christopher Tilghman, Nancy Zafris
Nonfiction: Geeta Kothari
Poetry: Natalie Shapero
Nature Writing: David Baker
Workshop for Teachers: Erick Gordon, Brad Richard
NEW! Translation: Katherine Hedeen, Elizabeth Lowe

Find out more about all of the KR Writers Workshops here.

New in KR Podcasts

This month we offer two more podcasts not to be missed. Essayist Brenda Miller talks to Kaitlyn Teer about exploring intuitive, contemplative, playful, and collaborative approaches to writing, making video essays and word-image hybrid texts, and experimenting with form to find your story. While novelist Lee K. Abbott talks to Nick White about his experience leading fiction workshops, writing for the lady on the bus, and why Dolly Parton is the total package. Add KR to your iTunes playlist.

From KROnline: Between Stars

BY BENJAMIN KOLP

My boyfriend and his ex-wife were a one-hit wonder. They are a one-hit wonder. That’s something you are forever.

Theirs is a song I know by heart. So do you. They still play it on the radio, and not just here in the north woods. They play it in cities. They play it from satellites. Ryan and his ex-wife, singing together in space.

But geosynchronous orbit is not forever, I tell my students. Consider the tug of the sun, the nag of the moon. Consider the imperfections of our own planet: our flattened poles and equatorial bulge, our fickle attractions. Given time, all orbits precess and decay.
Continue reading this story on KROnline.

Message in a Bottle

BY NADINE GORDIMER

From the Kenyon Review, Spring 1962, Vol. XXIV, No. 2

South African writer and political activist Nadine Gordimer received numerous awards and honors during her career, among them the Booker Prize, the Rome Prize, and, in 1991, the Nobel Prize in Literature. We revisit here a relatively early story, first published in KR and later appearing in a 1965 collection of her short fiction, Not For Publication, and Other Stories.

There are days when the world pauses, gets stuck, senselessly, like one of those machines that ought to give cigarettes or make balls bump round but simply becomes an object that takes kicks, shakes, unyieldingly. You drop out of step with the daily work or habit that carries you along and stare about. Halt, halt! It’s fatal. This is not Sunday, with cows beside winter willows and dried-up streams, and white egrets catching up with their own forward-jerking necks. I notice a face in the strip of mirror attached with crystal knobs to the pillar in the coffee shop. An uneven face, looks as if it’s been up all night for years: my own. Continue reading this story.

From the KR Blog: A Conversation About the Poetics of Science

In conjunction with this special issue, the Kenyon Review is hosting an online discussion of writers, editors, and scientists on what makes great science writing. Over the next two months, we will publish a series of responses, along with other blog posts and book reviews devoted to literary science writing. We start with a provocative piece by science writer and editor Jamie Zvirzdin entitled “Observations of a Science Editor: If Romantic Scientists Pilfered Fiction’s Toolbox, You Can Too,” followed by a number of responses from some of today’s most exciting writers. Read the conversation.

A Micro-Conversation with Helen Betya Rubinstein

Helen Betya Rubinstein’s essay “On Not Eating the Marshmallow” appears in the Sept/Oct 2016 issue of the Kenyon Review.

Were there any surprising details about the Stanford marshmallow experiment you discovered during your research that you weren’t able to include in this piece?

There’s a lot I wish I could have included in the essay—videos using the parable of the marshmallow test to promote abstinence or savings accounts, for starters. As I read and continue to read about the experiment, though, what stands out to me is the political nature of this conversation. . . . In an essay titled “S’More Inequality: the Neoliberal Marshmallow and the Corporate Reform of Education,” historian Bethany Moreton notes that corporate rhetoric saturates descriptions of the brain common to this branch of psychology—think “executive function” and the “CEO model of willpower”—and argues that “the rediscovery of willpower has become a policy tool for disciplining Hispanic and African American children.” Read the interview.

OCTOBER 2016
CONTENTS
KR Awards
Why We Chose It
Knox Reads!
Grodd Poetry Contest
Reading Period
2017 Writers Workshops
KR Podcast
From KROnline
From the Archive
From the Blog
KR Conversations

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