Letters & Essays
Creating The Paris Review
Editor's Note
Lorin Stein, from 2010
In its first five years, the Review ran work by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, and Robert Bly. Let the critics say what they liked (what serious critic could stomach Kerouac and Naipaul?), the writing was alive. The Review never espoused a school. The editors were against schools on principle. They didn’t do themes, either, or special issues. Their job, as they saw it, was to find and publish, not things they considered competent, or merely worthy, but things they actually loved ...
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No. 204 Spring 2013
David Searcy, Mad Science
Hank VanWagoner was the most spectacular smart kid in the neighborhood. He lived two or three houses down across the alley, and we’d hear him testing rockets in his backyard sometimes, usually on weekends. Bear ...
Vivian Gornick, Letter from Greenwich Village
In the drugstore I run into ninety-year-old Vera, a Trotskyist from way back who lives in a fourth-floor walk-up in my neighborhood, and whose voice is always pitched at the level of soapbox urgency. She is waiting ...
No. 203 Winter 2012
J. D. Daniels, Letter from Kentucky Full Text
John C. Skaggs was born in Green County in 1805, thirteen years after Kentucky became our fifteenth state. His son, Ben Skaggs, was born in 1835 in Bald Hollow and married Missouri Ann Carter. Their second eldest ...
No. 201 Summer 2012
Davy Rothbart, Human Snowball
Rich Cohen, Pirate City
Long before the foundations of New Orleans were laid, the river existed as a legend and a rumor. It was the monster to the west, just beyond the next hill, stand of trees, prairie, horizon. It was the mother of all ...
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Young Berries
A mother brought her girl to a sanatorium for sickly children and left. I was that girl. The sanatorium looked over a big pond that was encircled by an autumnal park, with meadows and paths. The tall trees seemed ...
J. D. Daniels, Letter from Majorca Full Text
Let’s suppose you are a serious person, or you transmit to yourself certain conventional signals of a sort of seriousness: you reread Tacitus, you attempt to reread Proust but it can’t be done, you listen ...
No. 200 Spring 2012
John Jeremiah Sullivan, Sources for “The Princes” Full Text
Below are select documents from the sources referenced in “The Princes: A Reconstruction.” A complete list of sources is also available here. ...Bibliography of the Algonquian Languages, ...
David Searcy, El Camino Doloroso
The thing about custom cars and hot rods—glancing through a copy of Rod & Custom magazine, you can see they tend to grade into each other—is the strangely counterintuitive sort of ...
John Jeremiah Sullivan, The Princes: A Reconstruction
No. 198 Fall 2011
Geoff Dyer, Into the Zone
You know that expression “famous last words”? We are naturally curious about people’s last words, but it would be interesting to compile an exhaustive list of the first words—not just ...
Lydia Davis, Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary
Bouffées d’affadissement Not long ago, I was chatting with an older friend who is a retired engineer and also something of a writer, but not of fiction. When he heard that I had just finished a ...
No. 196 Spring 2011
Édouard Levé, When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue Full Text
When I was young, I thought Life: A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide: A User’s Manual how to die. I don’t really listen to what people tell me. I forget things I don’t ...
John Jeremiah Sullivan, Unnamed Caves
We approached a grotto. A curving, amphitheater-like hillside went down to a basin. It was Edenic. “No diver has ever been able to get to the bottom of that thing,” Jan said, indicating the blue-black ...
No. 195 Winter 2010
Peter Matthiessen et al., Thomas Guinzburg Full Text
1926–2010 What great good luck for our nebulous and as yet unnamed Paris Review when Tom Guinzburg, all unsuspecting of the role he was to play, turned up in Paris in the spring of 1952, shortly after ...
No. 194 Fall 2010
Lorin Stein, Editor's Note Full Text
Dear Reader: Fifty-seven years ago, in Paris, a handful of young expatriates started a little magazine devoted to fiction and poetry. This was not an obvious thing to do in 1953. The smart journals were ...
J. D. Daniels, Letter from Cambridge
John Jeremiah Sullivan, Mister Lytle: An Essay Full Text
When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least ...
No. 193 Summer 2010
Julia Whitty, Deep Blue Home
We motor through the clammy mists veiling the coastline. Visibility comes and goes but mostly goes, forcing us to home by sound—the dull thud and whoosh of waves, the piping calls of black guillemots, or sea ...
Victor LaValle, The Gospel According to P——
I didn’t even know my brother existed until I was ten years old. His was a name I’d heard floating around, but I never actually attached it to a human being. Like how I know Napoleon was real, but when I ...
Wenguang Huang, Coffin Keeper
When I was nine, I shared my bedroom with a coffin. My father had it made for my grandmother for her seventy-third birthday and referred to it as shou mu, which means something like “longevity wood,” and ...
No. 192 Spring 2010
Nicolai Lilin, The Pike
When I was small I didn’t care about toys. What I liked doing when I was four or five was prowling around the house to see if my grandfather or my uncle were taking their weapons apart to clean them. They were ...
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