The Paris Review

To celebrate the release of The Paris Review’s Summer issue, we put together a little video that takes you inside the pages of 201.

In case you’ve forgotten, the issue features Tony Kushner and Wallace Shawn on the art of theater; new fiction from Sam Lipsyte and Ann Beattie; nonfiction by Davy Rothbart, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Rich Cohen, and J.D. Daniels; a portfolio curated by Waris Ahluwalia; and poetry by Sophie Cabot Black, Roberto Bolaño, Raúl Zurita, John Ashbery, Octavio Paz, Lucie Brock-Broido, and David Ferry.

Subscribe now!

I remember reading my first Ann Beattie story. I was sitting in my dorm room on a loft bed with a hard mattress. This was in North Carolina, at night. The dorm was a big stone structure with crenelated battlements that made me dream of castles. My room overlooked the main quad, and I often heard boozy students in the background, college kids stumbling from the buses as they made their way across the lawn and back to their rooms. I was reading from a paperback copy of Park City. I don’t recall much else. I was probably in sweats and an old tee that smelled like pot, lying on my bed, legs crossed with Beattie’s book upright on my chest. Since it was late, I had likely already eaten dinner—gluey pasta and mozzarella sticks delivered in foil pans. Maybe the door was locked. But what I do remember is this: the soft shiver that gathered at the back of my neck as I flipped through the final pages of “The Burning House” and, in the end, chilled me to my core.

After that first story, I kept reading. Aside from admiring her effortless, cool prose, I was drawn to Beattie’s gay characters. They were everywhere—“The Burning House,” “The Cinderella Waltz,” “Gravity”—and they were so different from the kinds of gay characters I was used to reading about. None of them were dying of AIDS or getting beat up or coming out to their parents. Instead, they drank Galliano by the bottle and ashed their joints in unusual places—a boiling pot of sauce, for instance. The same could be said for the other characters who populated Beattie’s fiction. Their problems were so … ordinary.

But if you lined me and Beattie’s characters up, I’d stick out like a sore thumb. Here’s the difference: Beattie’s boys and girls are Greenwich, Connecticut; I’m just a kid from Columbus, Ohio. They’re post-Woodstock; I’m post-Britney. Even though I’ve traveled with parents as far as Rome and the Red Sea, we don’t have a mountain home in Vermont. We don’t have friends who own an art gallery in SoHo.

Read More »

Unlike some magazines, we don’t do “theme” issues. And yet, as we collected the material that makes up 201, we couldn’t help notice that the issue had a decidedly ... dramatic bent. Not just interviews with Tony Kushner and Wallace Shawn, but Ann Beattie’s story, “The Astonished Woodchopper,” featuring just that; a Sam Lipsyte story about a modern-day duel; Roberto Bolaño poems about sex and betrayal; Rich Cohen on pirates; Waris Ahluwalia on animal attraction; Davy Rothbart telling the true story of the best night of his life; plus, J.D. Daniels directing you to eat your parents.

Tony Kushner:

In some ways the Internet is definitely an enemy. This morning I was going to work on a Lincoln rewrite before I came to meet you. A couple of days ago I biked all over Provincetown looking for a needle threader—you know, one of those old-fashioned little tin discs with a cameo on it and a thin wire loop sticking out. I found one and bought it. I’m trying to teach myself how to needlepoint. I even considered bringing my needlepointing here, needlepointing during the interview, but then what would you think? Anyway, I bought this needle threader, but it was crap–two uses into it, the thing broke. So, this morning before working on Lincoln, I decided I would go online and find a really good needle threader. And who knew that on Amazon alone, there are dozens of needle threaders? So I started thinking, Why does this needle threader have five starts and this one four and a half? And this one only has two, isn’t that interesting? Can you imagine who got this needle threader and was really disappointed? And then, it’s like, Oh my God, it’s ten o’clock! I didn’t do any work.

Wallace Shawn:

I wish there were more plays about a life that is exactly like mine. I would love that! If the program says, ‘An apartment in Manhattan today,’ I’m thrilled! And if it says, ‘An apartment in Chelsea, in Manhattan, today,’ where I live, I’d be even more thrilled. I’m amazed if I can see an actor imitate someone with a French accent—that’s fantastic—and I’m even more excited if an actor can illuminate the psychological state of a person similar to me and the people I know. So I do like naturalistic theater. But I like many kinds of theater.

Plus, poetry from John Ashbery, Sophie Cabot Black, Raúl Zurita, Octavio Paz, Lucie Brock-Broido, and David Ferry; nonfiction by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya; and a new translation of Virgil.

Subscribe now!

You may have heard by now that there’s a Paradise Lost movie in the works, starring Bradley Cooper as the Devil—WTF?! Do you think film adaptation is a good or bad thing for books, particularly ones with wide recognition to begin with? —Liesel

WTF indeed. The two most famous complaints about Paradise Lost are that it’s really, really long (Edgar Allan Poe) and that it’s weak on visuals (T. S. Eliot). If ever a blind poet needed the magic touch of Ridley Scott, that poet was John Milton. But I’m the wrong person to ask—I’ve been holding out for the movie version ever since tenth grade.

Are there any books coming out this fall that you’re particularly excited about? —Leo

Lots—and the stack keeps growing. Two days ago, for example, my sister gave me the galleys of a first novel, Various Positions, by the young Canadian writer Martha Schabas, all about the sexual awakening of a ballerina. Anna tells me I’m going to love it (no matter that I skipped Black Swan) ... But sticking just to novels that I’ve actually read: in these pages I’ve already mentioned Chad Harbach’s debut, The Art of Fielding, Nicholson Baker’s sweet-natured book of smut, House of Holes, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s novella The Truth About Marie. Readers of The Paris Review proper know Ben Lerner as a poet; his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, is about ... well, it’s about a young poet on a fellowship in Madrid, but I enjoyed it so much I read it twice (and laughed out loud both times). I keep going back to Ann Beattie’s Mrs. Nixon, which is fascinating and only sort of a novel; it veers from fiction into biographical essay, into essay on the art of fiction. Last night I stayed up late—much later than I meant to—reading Spring, an addictively earnest novel about English yuppies in love, by David Szalay. Finally, Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot has what must be the most seductive first sentences of the season (seductive, anyway, to a certain micro-demo, which I suspect may include certain readers of the Daily):

To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but by date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeline had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-sized but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeline had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for “Artistic,” or “Passionate,” thinking you could live with “Sensitive,” secretly fearing “Narcissistic” and “Domestic,” but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: “Incurably Romantic.”

Read More »

When I’m able to tear my eyes away from al-Jazeera, which isn’t often, I’ve been reading Ibrahim Aslan’s classic The Heron. Set on the eve of the 1977 bread riots, in a working class Cairene neighborhood, it’s essential reading for anyone who’s been riveted—as who has not?—by the uprising in Egypt. It’s also a great read, expertly translated by Elliott Colla. And if you can get your hands on the film adaptation, al-Kitkat, you’re in for a treat. —Robyn Creswell

I read every word of Tina Fey’s essay in The New Yorker this week. “I know older men in comedy who can barely feed and clean themselves, and they still work. The women, though, they’re all ‘crazy.’ I have a suspicion—and hear me out, because this is a rough one—that the definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.” —Thessaly La Force

In preparation for our forthcoming Ann Beattie interview, I decided to check out her collection What Was Mine. Beattie is a master of the short story. I could imagine her as being much like a character in her story “Windy Day at the Reservoir,” writing characters and stories that “declare their necessity, so she would not feel she was just some zookeeper, capturing them.” —Janet Thielke

Anne Enright’s graceful reminiscence of her former tutor, Angela Carter, isn’t just a fitting tribute to the woman Salman Rushdie once described as “the benevolent witch-queen” of English letters. It’s a vicarious travelogue, a wry investigation into the significance of mirrors and a tartly candid disquisition on the firm difference between wanting to write and needing to write. Clearly somebody was paying attention in class! —Jonathan Gharraie

Poetry editor Robyn Creswell’s essay for The New York Times Book Review on the writer in Egyptian society. —Lorin Stein

I like to imagine I’m an ambitious reader, but for the true book nerd, try keeping up with the National Book Critics Circle’s “31 Books in 31 Days.” If anything, it makes one appreciate how good criticism can be an excellent excuse not to read the book! —T. L.

We are very pleased to announce our lineup for the Spring Revel, which will be held on April 12 at Cipriani 42nd Street:

The Paris Review Spring Revel
Honoring James Salter

Featuring

The Hadada Prize
presented by Robert Redford

The Plimpton Prize for Fiction
presented by Ann Beattie

The Terry Southern Prize for Humor
presented by Fran Lebowitz

Yves-Andre Istel and Kathleen Begala
Benefit Chairs

Stay tuned in 2011 for ticket and table information, as well as some excellent James Salter coverage on the Daily.