David Vann’s Caribou Island is my favorite novel of the past few years. I read it last summer for possible excerpt in The Paris Review. It’s the story, set against the striking landscape of the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska, of Irene and Gary, whose thi…
It’s official. Former managing editor Caitlin Roper is leaving New York for San Francisco, where she’ll be an editor at Wired. We thought it’d be nice to let her pinch hit for team Paris Review before she leaves for the West Coast. This week, she an…
“Art and nature are siblings, branches of the one tree.” —John Fowles Barry Lopez often explores the relationship between landscape and culture in his nonfiction. He wrote the introduction to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of John Fowles's powerf…
In honor of R. Crumb's birthday today, here are a few of my favorite outtakes from his interview, the first Art of Comics, which appears in our summer issue, still on newsstands. Interviewer Ted Widmer asks Crumb how he feels about publishing hardcov…
Filmmaker John Waters is the author of Role Models, which was published this May by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. I caught up with him recently while he was in Provincetown.I saw your appearance on The Colbert Report and I was impressed that you did…
Issue contributors Colum McCann and Victor LaValle will read tonight at The Half King for our last event to celebrate the current issue. There will be a Q&A, drinks, and fun. We look forward to seeing you!
The Half King
505 West 23rd Street, at 1…
This is the second installment of Roper's culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 11:30 A.M. John Waters interview. He’s in Provincetown for the summer, so we have to talk on the phone. I’m disappointed not to meet him in person, b…
DAY ONE 9:20 A.M. Owen Gray album Forward on the Scene (1975) in my headphones on the way to work. This album is so good, it lightens my heart. I remember my favorite Gray song, his version of “Give Me Little Sign.” I put it on. Before I realize…
Katherine Dunn's story, "Rhonda Discovers Art," opens our new summer issue. (It's generated excitement among her fans and even made New York Magazine's Approval Matrix this week.) The seeds for this story's appearance in The Paris Review were planted…
R. Crumb is the subject of the first Paris Review Art of Comics interview. “I used myself as a character in the introductory page of the first few issues of Zap Comix, showed myself in a wacky cartoon, R. Crumb, the cartoonist.” His self-portraits,…
Katherine Dunn’s novel, Geek Love, is the most singular, evocative, twisted, hilarious book I have ever read. Every sentence contains a surprise. There is nothing else like it. I’ve given a copy of Geek Love as a gift at least once a year for the las…
You might be familiar with the oeuvre of Caitlin Roper as The Paris Review’s resident tweeter. In between tweets, Caitlin is managing editor of the Review. For the summer issue Caitlin has surpassed herself—valiantly stepping in as interim editor b…
Thank you, Mike Leaverton, for your notice in SF Weekly about our event at The Booksmith in San Francisco next Monday, June 14. (Hope to see you there!) And thank you, too, for the opportunity to clarify a few things about the legend of the Paris Re…