The Paris Review

This week, The Paris Review takes over New York!

Tonight, editor Lorin Stein will be at McNally Jackson with Sarah Manguso to discuss her new book, The Guardians: An Elegy. David Shields rhapsodized that The Guardians “is very pure and elemental, and I wanted nothing coming between me and the page.” Don’t let anything stand in your way, either; stoke your excitement for the discussion by reading our excerpt of the book here!

Then, on Friday, Geoff Dyer and John Jeremiah Sullivan, both contributors to our two-hundredth issue, discuss their books Zona and Pulphead at 192 Books. A man whom Zadie Smith dubbed a “national treasure” and our Southern editor in one room? We can’t imagine anything better.

We hope to see you there!

Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Lorin Stein
March 6, 7 P.M.
Location: McNally Jackson
52 Prince Street
New York, NY 10012

Geoff Dyer in Conversation with John Jeremiah Sullivan
March 9, 7 P.M.
Location: 192 Books
192 10th Avenue
New York, NY 10011
RSVP only. To reserve your spot, call 212-255-4022.

Hi Mr. Stein. I went to a talk you gave many months ago at McNally Jackson about The Paris Review. You said something that has stayed in my mind, especially now that President Obama has said that we will be withdrawing from Afghanistan. You said that you believe what you’re doing with The Paris Review (and literature in general) was just as important as the coverage a newspaper like The New York Times gives to the wars in the Middle East. Can you explain? I see in some ways how you are making a point, but I can’t help but think that literature has to weigh a little bit lower on the scale of important things, especially against war.
Sincerely,
Thom

Yikes! I hope I didn’t say that—I certainly don’t think it! What I can imagine saying is that, in one person’s tiny life, it is possible for art to loom larger than the news of the day. I can also imagine saying that this strikes me as a good thing. There are people the country needs to hear from regarding military strategy, and people it doesn’t. I, for instance, am someone with whom there’s not much point discussing troop levels.

Your question makes me think of Roberto Bolaño’s comic novel The Third Reich, all about a writer who sacrifices everything—love, friends, home, job—for a board game ... a board game in which he restrategizes the entire Second World War so the Nazis will win. Writers are like that. They are, among other things, people for whom the unimportant outweighs the important. What’s more (at least in Bolaño’s fiction), they are people you wouldn’t want to see involved in foreign policy, because they’d screw it up, or play—as often as not—for the wrong side.

What do you think of M.F.A. programs? A. R. Ammons says in his Paris Review interview that “it sometimes happens that these professional M.F.A. people are also poets, but it rarely happens.” Do you agree with Ammons, or do you think these places can play a meaningful role in nurturing poets and other writers? Yours, E. M.

I think A. R. Ammons is using the word poet in a special way. Poets often do. He means there are not many great poets in writing programs. It’s true: but then, there are not many great poets anywhere. That doesn’t mean you can’t learn something about poetry in a writing program. And most of them are nothing if not nurturing. For me the question is whether nurturing—whether being part of a caring community—makes for better work or for poems that people will actually want to read out there in the cold, hard world. For others, being part of that community is a powerful incentive to write. For these people, I think an M.F.A. makes all kinds of sense.

Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.

Photography by Douglas Adesko.

At the risk of, um, tweeting our own horn, this month’s Paper Magazine singles out our own Thessaly La Force and Sadie Stein, plus Daily contributors Maud Newton and Emma Straub, as New York's most “influential, fun, and fabulous” Twitterers.

But you knew that ...

We hope everyone had a wonderful holiday. We’re back, and busy as ever planning our spring issue and our spring Revel.

In the meantime, we’ve got an event this week! Join editor Lorin Stein, plus poetry editor Robyn Creswell, senior editor David Wallace-Wells, and me (web editor) this Thursday at McNally Jackson at 7:00 P.M. We’ll be talking about the challenges—and the opportunities—of publishing fiction and poetry in the online age. (And why we keep doing it in print.) And you can pick up our winter issue, which is carried at McNally Jackson. See you there.

It’s been a long book tour for Ann Beattie’s collected New Yorker stories, and the tour hasn’t even begun yet. “Is this my first stop?” she asks, pressing a hand to her forehead. “I don’t remember.” We are sitting downstairs at McNally Jackson Books, about an hour before her reading is scheduled to start. Her publisher approaches with an update about the Miami Book Fair on Saturday (destination number two on the tour): Beattie can arrive at 10:45, not a problem, but could she make sure to drop by the hospitality tent? Also, in fifteen minutes, her friend will be upstairs, ready to meet her for tea.

“I’ll have to change into my high heels at some point,” the author sighs. She’s spent the day on her feet, but she looks poised and fresh in a floral-patterned skirt, deep green blouse, and pale green sweater. Cabled gold glitters at her wrists and neck. Like Ellen, the protagonist in “A Platonic Relationship”—the first story in the collection, from which she will read tonight—she wears her hair loose, “falling free.” When I admire her nails, which are long, tapered, and crimson, she smiles almost apologetically. “I have insomnia,” she explains. Applying nail polish is one of the few ways she can occupy herself at night without waking her husband. She adds that the age of the word processor has been kinder to her hands than that of the typewriter: Returning the carriage while at work on a story, she once snapped off four-fifths of her manicure.

Most readers would consider the sacrifice worthwhile. Over four decades, fiction by Beattie has appeared forty-eight times in The New Yorker’s pages, making the D.C.- born author something of an institution. Her blend of acuity and flattened affect now defines a genre, with its own adjective: Beattiesque. Beattie herself sees more similarities between her stories than differences. She calls them permutations of a single voice, though reviewers tend to emphasize evolutions in her style. An older Beattie, goes the conventional wisdom, has mellowed into lyricism. Her sentences have filled out and deepened; a sense of mastery stands in for the original sense of discovery. But Beattie denies that more than the surface has changed. Continuity and consistency are words that keep coming up, along with the descriptor “tongue in cheek.” Also: dogs. In her stories, the dogs often seem as complex as the human characters. Is Beattie herself a dog person?

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