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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.

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What do you have to give up in order to feel alive? To answer this question we need to have some sense of what aliveness might mean to us, of what we have to do to feel alive, and how we know when we are feeling this seemingly most obvious and ordinary thing (at its most abstract we might be wondering, as a kind of guideline, what our criteria are for feeling alive). It may seem odd to think that feeling alive is not only an issue—is something that needs to be assessed—but requires a sacrifice of sorts, or is indeed a sacrificial act; that to feel alive involves us in some kind of renunciation. It is, of course, glibly and not so glibly true that in order to feel alive one might have to give up, say, one’s habitual tactics and techniques for deadening oneself, the anaesthesias of everyday life that can seem to make it livable. At its most minimal, after all, it is not unusual for people to feel profoundly ambivalent about being fully alive to the climate of terror and delight in which we live. In order to answer this question you would, of course, need to have some sense of what aliveness means, if anything. How do you feel alive, and how do you know if you feel it?

Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist literary critic, wrote in his famous essay “Art as Technique” of 1917:

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war … And art [through its defamiliarizing practices] exists that one may recover the sensation of life … The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

It is, perhaps, an ironic inevitability integral to what Shklovsky proposes that art as a process and practice of defamiliarization is now all too familiar to us. Whether or not we agree with Walter Pater’s remark that “our failure is to form habits,” when Shklovsky invokes the whole idea of recovering the sensation of life, he reminds us—and clearly we need reminding—that the sensation of life can be lost. And he implies, without making this as explicit as he might, that we also want to relinquish or even sometimes attack the sensation of life; as though, as I say, in psychoanalytic language, we are ambivalent about the sensation of life and can happily, as it were, dispense with it.