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
October 5, 2021 A Letter from the Editor A Dispatch from Emily Stokes, Editor By Emily Stokes Dear Readers, We’ve missed you, and we know what you’re probably thinking: Why is there no Fall issue of The Paris Review? Has the staff taken some kind of sabbatical? Perhaps they have given up on print altogether? (There is, as you might have heard, a national paper shortage.) I am here to assure you that we have not absconded to a Greek island, nor have we (just) been curled up with cups of tea. Read More