September 7, 2022 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Fall Issue By Emily Stokes Several weeks ago, I received an email from a reader named Walter. He asked—very politely (this Walter was Canadian)—why it was that, as of issue no. 238, The Paris Review had decided to list both fiction and nonfiction in the magazine’s table of contents simply under “Prose.” You can read my attempt to answer his question here, but it strikes me now that you can also find a host of other responses, albeit oblique ones, in the pages of our Fall issue, out today. Take the Australian writer Helen Garner, who has been accused by more than one indignant reviewer of trying to pass off her personal diary as fiction, and whom Thessaly La Force interviewed over the course of several months this year. For a while, we agonized over how to categorize their conversation. Weren’t Garner’s enthralling, emotionally astute journalistic accounts of legal trials worthy of an Art of Nonfiction? Wouldn’t her collected journals, which are as immersive as any novel, merit an Art of the Diary? In the end, we went for Art of Fiction, if only as a call to action for anyone who hasn’t yet read The Children’s Bach. (For me, The Spare Room comes in a close second.) Garner herself might well have made a different call: “All those comments I’ve had to cop about my novels not being novels—they rest on that idea that the novel is mightier than every other form,” she tells La Force. “Men tend to care more about those hierarchies than most women writers do.” Read More
September 6, 2022 A Letter from the Editor For the Record, the Review Has Not Abolished Fiction By The Paris Review Subject: Inquiry about a small change beginning with issue 238 Dear Emily, Volume 238 dropped the fiction and nonfiction labels previously attached to prose pieces. I found no rationale for the decision in your editor’s note to that edition, although your reference to “fiction or nonfiction or something in between” may be an allusion to an answer I am not sophisticated enough to understand. Why has The Paris Review dropped the fiction and nonfiction labels? Were the labels always included in past editions (I’ve only been subscribing since 2019)? I ask because perhaps my need to categorize a piece of writing before I begin reading is telling of something about me that I’ve never considered before. And granted some fiction is obviously so and could not be understood to be otherwise, but when I read on page 187 of your latest that “It’s 4:38 P.M., eight minutes after I usually go home, but now I’m rooting around under my chair cushion …” I want to know, was this ever true? Thank you for your time, Walter Yellowknife, NT Canada p.s. I love what you’ve done with The Paris Review in terms of its physicality. The writing continues to awe (for example, the Sterling Holywhitemountain piece was brilliant). Read More
June 15, 2022 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Summer Issue By Emily Stokes “In more than one language the words for love and suffering are the same,” observes the narrator of Sigrid Nunez’s debut novel, A Feather on the Breath of God. “I have hurled myself at men’s hearts like a javelin.” But Nunez herself, whose Art of Fiction interview appears in our new Summer issue, has no interest in effortful seduction. Speaking to the Review’s Lidija Haas in early May, she expressed impatience with writers who want to break their readers’ hearts: “There’s an arrogance to that that has always bothered me. You leave my heart alone!” Writing that beguiles and devastates often appears to do so casually, with the smallest of phrases or gestures, and those moments were what caught at us as we put this issue together: a little girl, in a debut work of fiction by Harriet Clark, patted down by her grandfather with a tailor’s respectful discretion on their Saturday visits to her mother in prison; a phone call from a former lover, his voice as jarringly familiar as “the feeling of my tongue inside my mouth,” in Robert Glück’s “About Ed”; that gentle “mm-kay” in a poem by Terrance Hayes written in the voice of Bob Ross. Read More
March 15, 2022 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Spring Issue By Emily Stokes Five days before the Spring issue went to press, I found myself perched on a sofa in the Review’s Chelsea office, listening as Jamaica Kincaid and Darryl Pinckney put the finishing touches on a conversation they’d begun eight years earlier. By then, my colleagues and I had pored over hundreds of pages of transcripts for Kincaid’s Art of Fiction interview, and yet, that Monday afternoon, as the two writers went back over the stories she’d told him about her childhood on Antigua, her adventures as a young journalist in seventies New York, and her life as a writer, new details kept emerging. She was a backup singer in Holly Woodlawn’s band before being replaced by Debbie Harry? She drafted Annie John out loud in the bath while pregnant with her first child? Read More
November 18, 2021 A Letter from the Editor With Cherries on Top By Emily Stokes You may notice that we’re looking a bit different today. Last week, we sent the Winter 2021 issue to Prolific, our new printer in Canada, and it looks a bit different, too. The design was inspired by the minimalism of older issues of the Review—among them no. 56, published in 1973, which I have been carrying around for the past few months. The table of contents is enticing: poetry by Anne Waldman and Alice Notley; “Emmy Moore’s Journal,” featuring one of Jane Bowles’s “odd, half-unworldly, off-kilter heroines,” as Lydia Davis put it in our anthology Object Lessons. But I am possessive of my copy for another reason. This summer, when our designer, Matt Willey, first visited the Review’s Chelsea office, he and I were immediately drawn to issue no. 56 as an object. We liked the book’s trim size, small enough that you could hold it open in one hand, and the type, which though not big was surprisingly legible, dark and fat. The paper felt intimate—textured in a way that seemed to ask to be dog-eared, or even scribbled on. And we loved the cover, which featured a geometric artwork by the American conceptual artist Mel Bochner. Read More