The Paris Review

Yesterday a whole bunch of us got up earlyish to talk shop with Janet Coleman on “The Next Hour.” Click here to hear Maggie Paley (“Terry Southern, The Art of Screenwriting”), Rowan Ricardo Philips (“Heralds of Delicioso Coco Helado”), Leanne Shapton (“Prose Purple”), Matt Sumell (“Toast”), John Jeremiah Sullivan (“The Princes”), Robyn Creswell, and Lorin Stein.

It’s no secret how much I admire Leanne Shapton. The former art director of The New York Times’ Op-Ed page is also the author of several books, including Was She Pretty? and Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. She’s also a contributor to The Paris Review. Open any of the last four issues to glimpse her beautiful illustrations of Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich. Or buy issue 196, whose cover she painted. I visited her studio space north of Manhattan last spring. I can still remember her dog, Bunny, running to greet me. Leanne served tea and sweets, and we talked long after I turned off my tape recorder.

I wake up, walk the dog, or let the dog out. I’ll pretty much start working right off the top, depending on what I need to do, on deadlines.

I was talking to Sheila Heti about how and where we work. Sometimes I feel I get a lot done waiting for something else, with my shoes and coat on, with the car running. I don’t have a set routine. I can work for hours at a time, but I get a lot of stuff done in these weird starts and stops, which makes it a little bit harder to track. I have so many backs of envelopes with notes written on them in my pockets or stuffed into the side door of a car. I also use my Blackberry to write myself notes. Last night, I wrote myself an e-mail that said, “Tough girls with dark pink skin, England air, etc.” Now it’s sort of coming back to me, but when I woke up and read it, I was like, “What? What did I drink?” Lots happens in these little spaces between work and eating and sleeping. Sheila said she had this image of me standing up—you know how you stand up and eat when you’re really hungry? Well I stand up and work. It’s not a Hemingway thing, it’s more like I have to get this done, because the elevator is coming up. Some thing happens then. And that’s when I work.

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The Paris Review sends you holiday cheer—and our Winter issue! Naughty or nice, it’s got something for everyone: a portfolio of women by women, curated by our art editor, Charlotte Strick; fiction by Clarice Lispector, Paul Murray, and Adam Wilson; the English-language debut of  French literary sensation Valérie Mréjen; and the conclusion of Roberto Bolaño’s lost novel The Third Reich, with original illustrations by Leanne Shapton.

The Winter issue also contains long-awaited interviews with—

Jeffrey Eugenides:

I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to.

and Alan Hollinghurst:

I was very excited by the idea of telling truths that hadn’t been told before and breaking down literary categories. Descriptions of gay sexual behavior had until then tended to be restricted to pornography, and the presence of gay lives in fiction had been scant. So I had the great fortune of being given this relatively unexplored territory.

Plus … poems by David Wagoner, Jonathan Galassi, Dorothea Lasky, Ange Mlinko, Gottfried Benn, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips.

Subscribe now!

We’ve heeded your wishes and, by popular demand, our super-duper Leanne Shapton–illustrated Paris Review beach towel is now available for purchase, yours for a very reasonable $20.

But wait! For only $20 more, you can add a full year of fiction and poetry. That’s right: with the price of a subscription, the towel can be yours, free.

The smartest towel of summer and reading material to match? That’s what we call a deal.

Adam Gilders.

In 1998, Adam Gilders, a Canadian writer, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Before his death in 2007 at the age of thirty-six, he wrote close to two hundred stories. Though Gilders’s fiction has been featured in The Paris Review and The Walrus, two of his friends, Jason Fulford and Leanne Shapton, decided to publish a more comprehensive book of Gilders’s writing under their independent imprint, J&L Books. Together, with Geoffrey Bainbridge, Miranda Purves, John Zilcosky, and Adam’s mother, Carla Gilders, they edited Another Ventriloquist, which debuts this Saturday, May 7, at the J&L FUNdraiser. We spoke to Jason and Leanne about the book.

Another Ventriloquist is an unnervingly good read. Can you talk about the status of the book when Adam died of a brain tumor in 2007? Had any of his friends discussed with him the possibility of gathering his writing into a book?

He never talked about publishing a collection of his stories. That was all our idea.

When he died, he had around two hundred unpublished pieces on his computer. One of the first conversations we had with his mother and friends after the funeral was about needing to get his stories collected and published. We never even knew he wrote so much. He was very critical of his own work and most of it he would have never brought forward for publication, especially not the older pieces or funny stuff like “Michael Douglas.” This is the one silver lining we can see to the situation—we get to read all these stories.

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It’s a big week for friends of The Paris Review, one full of readings, parties, and performances that we thought you, our dear readers, might like to attend:

Saturday, May 7: FUNraiser for J&L BOOKS

Leanne Shapton and Jason Fulford will host a fundraiser for their imprint, J&L books, which dedicates itself to publishing well-designed books of previously unpublished or rarely seen work by contemporary artists. A $10 ticket will get you a letterpressed Mother’s Day card and a raffle ticket, as well as access to a sale of vintage clothes, and original art by J&L artists. Later that evening, J&L will celebrate the launch of Another Ventriloquist by Adam Gilders. Click here for more information.

Monday, May 9: David Bezmozgis and Francine Prose

The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center will host a conversation between David Bezmozgis and Francine Prose, who are the authors of The Free World and My New American Life, respectively. Tickets are free but must be reserved. Click here for more information.

Tuesday, May 10: Geoff Dyer Talks with Lorin Stein

At Greenlight Books, Geoff Dyer and Lorin Stein will discuss Dyer’s latest book, a collection of essays called Otherwise Known as the Human Condition at Greenlight Books. Click here for more information.

Wednesday, May 11: Pop-Up Magazine + ESPN Magazine

What happens when you make a magazine for just one night? Nothing is published, nothing goes online—it’s a live magazine. Join contributors to The New Yorker, This American Life, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and others as they share stories, films, interviews, photography, and much more live on stage. Tickets are $25, click here for more information.

And keep up by checking out our events calendar!