I wish you could just say, This is a book—not have to call it anything. Underlying the famously big gap between fiction and nonfiction there’s a rather naive belief that fiction is invented—that it’s pulled out of thin air.
In Merritt Tierce’s debut novel, Love Me Back, life does not go as planned. A Texas high school student named Marie becomes pregnant on a missionary trip when she’s only sixteen. The event completely changes Marie’s life. Raising a child means no…
It was announced this morning that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala died today at her home in Manhattan, at the age of eighty-five. Jhabvala is best known as an award-winning screenwriter for Merchant Ivory Productions. Together, with the late producer Ismail Me…
If you’ve been loving Lena Dunham’s Girls, you should most certainly pick up a copy of Sheila Heti’s new novel, How Should a Person Be? In it, fictional Sheila struggles to answer the titular question through conversations with her friends (including…
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 Dool…
Watch this beautiful video about Brazenhead Books, a secret bookstore that’s been tucked away in Michael Seidenberg’s apartment on the Upper East Side ever since the rent for his original retail space in Brooklyn was quadrupled. (Jonathan Lethem …
Did you know that Jennifer Egan was robbed by a motorcyclist in Spain at the age of twenty-two? That when she was little, she wanted to be a doctor, but then she tried to be an archeologist? That she’s written exactly one celebrity profile and it…
In 1796, at the age of thirty-two, Mary Lamb had an attack of madness and killed her mother and wounded her father with a knife. She was institutionalized for three years until the death of her father, when, at the behest of her younger brother, Ch…
For over the last year, Thomas Bean and Luke Polling have been working on a documentary about George Plimpton called, well, Plimpton!. Today they launched a Kickstarter project to help them cover the expensive costs of paying for archival footage. …
Join contributing editor Sadie Stein tonight as she talks to Carmela Ciuraru about her new book, Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms. In a series of biographical snapshots that range from Orwell to Eliot, Ciuraru examines literary figures …
Toward the end of !Women Art Revolution, the performance artist Janine Antoni, who was born in 1964, recalls a moment when her professor, Mira Schor, asks if she’s heard of the work of Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, and Carolee Schneeman. Antoni hadn…
Francine Prose is a pleasure to interview. She is quick-witted and gracious, and there is this way that she says my name—“Oh, Thessaly, that’s an excellent question”—that makes me feel, for a split second, as if I’m the award-winning novelist that ha…
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 fund…
In 2008, on Christmas Day, Meghan O’Rourke’s mother, Barbara, died after a two-and-a-half-year battle with advanced colorectal cancer. O’Rourke was lost in her grief, which she found overwhelming and unlike anything she had ever experienced. He…
Next Tuesday, the Norwood Club, that mysterious brownstone on 14th Street devoted to the arts, is throwing open its doors to friends of The Paris Review. Sam Lipsyte, Alexandra Kleeman, and Lorin Stein will stage a mini retrospective of the last thre…
What a week! We’re still recovering from Tuesday’s Spring Revel. Check out these dispatches of the fête in Elle, The Observer, New York Social Diary, Bloomberg, Electric Literature, and Women’s Wear Daily. And now, because it’s Friday and we can’…
Last night, close to five hundred people gathered at Cipriani’s 42nd Street to honor James Salter at our Spring Revel. Robert Redford was there to present the Hadada Prize to Salter. The two have known each other since the sixties, when Salter wrot…
The Daily has been chosen as an Official Honoree by the 2011 Webby Awards in two categories: Best Copy/Writing and Blog, Cultural. “With nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 US states and over 60 countries,” says Webby Exec David-Michel Dav…
At every magazine or publishing house, there’s always an editor or two with a knack for titles. But even so, rarely does one come in a flash of divine inspiration. There are iterations and themes and the same words written over and over. Here is a …
On Tuesday, The Paris Review will be hosting its Spring Revel, a fund-raiser held each year at Cipriani’s 42nd Street. As readers of The Daily may already know, Robert Redford will be presenting James Salter with The Paris Review Hadada; Fran Lebowit…
James Salter’s outline for his novel, Light Years, which Jhumpa Lahiri wrote about today. Writes Lahiri, “In the beginning it was the light, the warmth of the novel that enchanted me.” Note how Salter is careful to think of the seasons as he move…
In the spring of 1976, Sigrid Nunez went to the apartment of Susan Sontag, who was recovering from cancer surgery and needed someone to help answer her mail. Nunez had just gotten her M.F.A. from Columbia and lived nearby to Sontag’s apartment at 3…
Tonight is our reading celebrating the centennial of Sybille Bedford. In 1993, The Paris Review ran an interview with Bedford: Oh, when I was about seven I was intensely shocked when the village people told me that my parents would be damned becaus…
You may have noticed that our site has shed its wintery blue. The spring issue is out today! But wait! Before you run to your local bookstore to buy a copy, listen to this. Every spring, we design a tote bag for the generous donors who attend our…
Our wonderful art editor Charlotte Strick took some time to talk to The Atlantic about her work as a graphic designer: What’s a design trend that you wish would go away? It’s not so much a design “trend”: the lack of quality in trade book pu…
The Armory Show kicked off today. Yesterday, The Daily’s special culture correspondent Jon Cotner was at the fair’s press conference with Mayor Bloomberg. Says Jon, “Reporters kept attacking Bloomberg for his education cuts. Eventually Bloomber…
The artist Lawrence Weiner lives on a quiet street in the West Village, in what was once an old laundromat built in 1910 and is now an unobtrusive five-level town house designed by the firm Lot-Ek. You may recognize some of the architecture: Lot-Ek i…
Spring is almost here—and so is our spring issue! It’s an especially exciting one: We will be publishing Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich—our first serialized novel in forty years—with original illustrations by Leanne Shapton. This is a first ed…
According to festival lore, in 1981, the film director Sydney Pollack suggested to Robert Redford that he move Sundance from Salt Lake City in September to Park City in January, arguing that the lure of fresh powder would attract more Hollywood t…
We wish to offer a hearty congratulations to our former editor, Philip Gourevitch, who will be awarded this evening with the insignia of chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters at the French Embassy in New York. Gourevitch served the Review from…
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 …
We’re closing shop for all of next week, and so will the Daily. And we won’t be back until January 3rd. I know you’ll miss us. If you haven’t already, check out our winter issue. Copies are being sold in select bookstores across the count…
On a recent winter afternoon, I sat down for tea with Linda Fargo and David Hoey of Bergdorf Goodman, on the top floor of the store, in the restaurant overlooking southern Central Park. Fargo, who has an immaculate silver bob, is clad in a black Bale…
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 Plim…
“This is like Top Chef,” I muttered. I was standing with my boyfriend, Fred, in the D’Agostino’s on Hudson Street, with exactly three hours on the clock until we were due to arrive at David Byrne’s office in Soho bearing a turkey-shaped comes…
If you can get your hands on Lord of Misrule, the novel by Wednesday’s National Book Award winner Jaimy Gordon, let me know (Amazon doesn’t count). In the meantime, check out this interview with her in Gargoyle Magazine that took place sometime in 19…
Do you happen to know in which London borough Zadie Smith was born? Or on which continent Nathan Englander set his first novel? If you know the answer to both of these questions, then write to me at this e-mail address. The first person to ge…
How to Read the Air is the second novel by Dinaw Mengestu. It’s narrated by a young American Ethiopian named Jonas Woldemariam. Jonas’s disintegrating marriage to his wife, Angela, forces him to retrace the steps his parents, Yosef and Miriam, to…
Each year, the Center for the Art of Translation publishes an anthology series called Two Lines that focuses on literary translation. This year’s anthology is titled Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, and it was edited by the translator Natasha Wimme…
By Nightfall, the sixth novel by Pulitzer Prize–winning Michael Cunningham, tells the story of Peter Harris, a gallery owner in Manhattan whose comfortable marriage is interrupted by the arrival of Mizzy (short for “the Mistake”), the younger b…
While on the California leg of his tour, Lorin has been writing dispatches for the special Frankfurt Book Fair edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Here is today’s dispatch, sent from San Francisco: Here in San Francisco I spent the ev…
You may have noticed that our Web site looks different. It's prettier, less cluttered, easier on the eyes—it's a delight to click on every page. Meet Jennifer, the Web designer with Tierra Innovation who was crucial to envisioning our redesign. Who…
Here's a short and lovely video for a Friday afternoon. Rose Styron, the wife of the late William Styron, recalls the earlier days of The Paris Review, and the parties that the Styrons used to throw. “We had the John Marquands,” she says, “The …
Over at The Atlantic today, Lorin shares some exciting news: our September issue (and Lorin's début) will feature interviews with Norman Rush and Michel Houellebecq. On Rush: When Norman Rush explains why he didn't publish his first book unt…
Lorin has written more for Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog over at The Atlantic. I hope you'll read everything he's written so far, but I thought I'd take the time to mention today's entry. Here, Lorin addresses the death of the book review, and his very insp…
Lorin will be guest blogging this week over at The Atlantic for Ta-Nehisi Coates. We'll be reading, and hope you will too. Today, in his first post, he tackles the hubbub surrounding Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, and the magic of discovery f…
Over on the National Book Critics Circle blog, Lorin Stein has shared five books that he believes belong in any reviewer's library. Here, Lorin explains the charisma of Susan Sontag: If you are (or want to be) a critic, then sometimes I think it'…
[gallery] In the middle of redesigning The Paris Review (stay tuned!) our new art editor, Charlotte Strick, takes time out to discuss how she got into the design business. (She's also responsible for the gallery of book jackets you see above.) Rea…
By day, Sloane Crosley is the Deputy Director of Publicity at Vintage/Anchor Books. But by—well, on every day, she's a New York Times bestselling author. Her latest book is How Did You Get This Number, which came out last month. It's a sparkling coll…
Boy, were we thrilled to discover that the Katherine Dunn story from our summer issue has appeared in the top right corner of New York Magazine's Approval Matrix! You can buy the issue at your local independent bookstore or on our site. And you c…
Last week, Lorin declared June 2010 “Terry Southern Month,” a pronouncement that was greeted with even more excitement and enthusiasm than we had anticipated. (“Hell yeah. One of my faves. Bring on June,” tweeted a reader. Southern “makes m…
What is on an ideal bookshelf? The books that made people who they are, that changed their lives. How long have you been painting bookshelves? Three years. Do you ever spot repeats? There’s a cookbook called The Silver Spoon—I’ve painted that…