Photograph of Moira McCavana by Mara Danoff; photograph of Caleb Crain by Peter Terzian.
We are excited to announce that on April 2, at our Spring Revel, Moira McCavana will receive the George Plimpton Prize, presented by the 2020 winner, Jonathan Escoffery, and the Susannah Hunnewell Prize will be presented to Caleb Crain by Jhumpa Lahiri. Both prizewinners were selected by the editorial committee of the Review’s board of directors.
The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993, honors our founding editor’s commitment to championing new talent and recognizes an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the magazine during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Yiyun Li, Isabella Hammad, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jesse Ball, Emma Cline, and the 2023 winner, Harriet Clark.
Moira McCavana is the recipient of a 2019 O. Henry Prize, and her work has appeared in Guernica, The Drift, Harvard Review, and The London Magazine. Her debut short-story collection, Electrodomésticos, was published by Sarabande Books in February. “Every Hair Casts a Shadow,” which appeared in our Fall 2023 issue (no. 245), is narrated by Inma, the owner of a failing shoe shop in Barcelona. The Paris Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:
“Every Hair Casts a Shadow” leaves most of its mysteries intact. Moira McCavana traces disparate characters in their obscure movements through grief. One believes her dead son communicates through trivia questions on a television game show. Another takes an interest in a younger man, her only employee in her failing shoe store, who charms her “by asking about my parents despite my age.” The young man shows a touching kindness to their few customers: “I watched Víctor’s silhouette sit the man down on the bench, remove his shoe, and gently extend the man’s foot out before him, nestling it inside the metal measuring device,” writes the narrator. It is only in the story’s last line that we learn about the “you” to whom the story is addressed.
Established in 2023, the Susannah Hunnewell Prize is awarded to a writer for an outstanding piece of prose or poetry published by the Review in the previous year and is given in memory of the Review’s beloved former publisher, who died in 2019. Hunnewell first joined the Review as an intern during George Plimpton’s editorship, and later served as Paris editor before taking on the role of publisher. Among her contributions to the magazine are some of the finest interviews in the Writers at Work series, including conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, Emmanuel Carrère, Harry Mathews, and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Caleb Crain, a longtime contributor to the Review, is the author of two novels, Necessary Errors and Overthrow, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, n+1, and The New Yorker. Of “The Letter,” Crain’s short story published in our Summer 2023 issue (no. 244), Simpson writes:
Caleb Crain’s haunting story is a meditation on young love, time, and what we’re unable to undo, in a contemporary retelling of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle.” It opens with a handwritten letter arriving extremely late to an urbane protagonist, Riley. It takes him a while to recognize the penmanship, which belonged to an old lover, one important enough that the man he lives with now knows his name.
“He’s the one with the toothbrush,” Riley’s partner says.
“They all had toothbrushes.”
“The one who moved his toothbrush in early.”
Crain makes use of old-fashioned tropes of fiction (and life)—a recovered letter, a return address, handwriting—to evoke the way we live now. Riley had dated the letter-writer before he “understood that he had a type.” When they broke up, a quarter century before the story begins, “they said they were going to remember each other for the rest of their lives, but Riley hadn’t known then that it was true. It could just have been a polite thing to say.”
“The Letter” is a story about unrequited love that would seem, as James’s does, to argue against the existence of such a thing. But, as modern love stories are less concerned with staying together than with how we’re able to or fail to help each other along the way, Riley’s regrets are for the generosities he couldn’t receive or give.
We hope you’ll join us at the Revel to celebrate McCavana and Crain. We’ll also be honoring Tobias Wolff with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature, which will be presented by Geoff Dyer. Held at Cipriani 42nd Street, the Revel gathers writers, artists, and friends to raise a glass to the very best writing—and to raise crucial funds that enable the Review to continue publishing the most exciting work by contributors at all stages of their careers. Tickets are now available online.