The Paris Review

I remember watching Ray Bradbury: Story of a Writer, a 1963 TV documentary, in seventh-grade English class. And for good reason: there’s more good advice for writing and life packed into these thirty minutes than in many a longer (and less entertaining) tutorial.

Iris DeMent

When Anthony Heilbut isn’t producing beautiful gospel, he tends to be writing—slowly—either about German modernism or else about the music and musicians he loves. The Fan Who Knew Too Much is the book Heilbut's gospel fans have been waiting for since The Gospel Sound (1972). In this connection, I can’t resist quoting our Southern editor right off the back cover: “Nothing new in the last year gave me as much pure reading pleasure as pages of this book. Heilbut ranges over the culture like a madman, but with a fierce sanity in his eye, debunking myths and erecting new ones. I finished The Fan Who Knew Too Much wondering how, without it, I’d ever thought I understood a thing about America in the twentieth century. Let me ask: Are you familiar with the history of gays in gospel? Or with the early, radio roots of soap operas? Then you too are similarly benighted. Get with this.” Amen. —Lorin Stein

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I didn’t grow up reading The Paris Review. My earliest encounter with the magazine—I’m somewhat ashamed to admit—came in graduate school, when I stumbled upon an interview with Milan Kundera. (I was writing a paper on translation, and the quote I pulled didn’t even make it into a footnote.) Had you asked me, a year or so later, when I found myself applying for an internship, what the magazine meant to me, I wouldn’t have given you an honest answer. It didn’t mean much of anything to me. I wanted a foot in the door in New York, and The Paris Review’s seemed as good a door as any.

The latest issue, 191, had closed just before I started, so my first few weeks were quiet. I read submissions, delivered packages, distributed the mail. Then came my first real assignment: We were running an interview with Ray Bradbury, and it needed fact-checking. I volunteered.

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