Three Prizewinning Stories

Rivers Solomon, Juliana Leite, and James Lasdun

The Paris Review Redux: free interviews, stories, poems, and art from the archives of The Paris Review. View this email in your browser We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won the 2024 ASME Award for Fiction, marking the second year in a row that the magazine has received the honor. The three prizewinning stories are Rivers Solomon's "This Is Everything There Will Ever Be," a disarmingly warm portrait of "just another late-forties dyke entirely too into basketball, dogs, and memes"; "My Good Friend," Juliana Leite's English-language debut, translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry, a story written in the form of an elderly widow's Sunday-evening diary entry about a mostly unspoken, mutual decades-long love; and James Lasdun's "Helen," in which a man writing about his parents' upper-class milieu in seventies London stumbles upon the journals of a family friend. This week, we've unlocked all three of these stories, and you can also listen to Rivers Solomon's story read by Lena Waithe on season four of The Paris Review Podcast.  PROSE This Is Everything There Will Ever Be Rivers Solomon She'd been going by Julius since the previous October, when a man cornered her after AA to ask how she got a name like Juke.  Before, she'd have explained that Juke was short for Jukebox, a nickname her daddy had given her, and when asked why Jukebox, she'd tell the usual lie—that it was because she was always singing as a little girl. Instead, she renamed herself on the spot. Actually, she said, I'd rather you called me Julius.  From issue no. 243 (Spring 2023) PROSE My Good Friend Juliana Leite My good friend and I take such good care of each other that of course it's love. But we don't use that word, because of the kids. Our friendship goes back to before our marriages, it's always poured out of everything and embraced all the people we chose along the way. The more my friend and I loved our spouses, the more we loved each other, too, as though both loves heightened and nurtured each other, even if one of them had come first. From issue no. 244 (Summer 2023) PROSE Helen James Lasdun She was a friend of my family—the Carlins, as I have chosen to call them. She and my father met in the fifties through the editor of the architecture magazine where she began her career. My father had taken her out a few times. They were never lovers, but there had been some tenderness between them: enough that, years later, when she took to phoning our house in the middle of the night, my father would drag himself out of bed, and I would hear the low monosyllables of someone listening to another's woes, patiently if without great interest, until I fell back to sleep. My mother, absolutely unthreatened by this sallow, angular woman with her horn-rimmed glasses and staring eyes, who by then looked unwell much of the time, would say, after these nocturnal disturbances, "Poor Helen. We ought to do something for her." From issue no. 244 (Summer 2023) Illustrations by Na Kim. Copyright © 2024 The Paris Review. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: The Paris Review 544 West 27th Street 3rd Floor New York, New York 10001 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe, if you must.