April 5, 2011 A Letter from the Editor TPR Gets Two Ellie Nods By Lorin Stein The Paris Review has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards: general excellence in a literary magazine, for our summer, fall, and winter issues and best essay or criticism for “Mister Lytle: An Essay,” by our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan. Awards will be presented on May 9. In the meantime, we have made the entirety of Sullivan’s essay available online: 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 a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew, or “old man,” or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux. He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” He was about to turn ninety-two when I moved into his basement, and he had not yet quite reached ninety-three when they buried him the next winter, in a coffin I had helped to make—a cedar coffin, because it would smell good, he said. I wasn’t that helpful. I sat up a couple of nights in a freezing, starkly lit workshop rubbing beeswax into the boards. The other, older men—we were four altogether—absorbedly sawed and planed. They chiseled dovetail joints. My experience in woodworking hadn’t gone past feeding planks through a band saw for shop class, and there’d be no time to redo anything I might botch, so I followed instructions and with rags cut from an undershirt worked coats of wax into the cedar until its ashen whorls glowed purple, as if with remembered life. Congratulations and thanks to all!
March 31, 2011 A Letter from the Editor John Jeremiah Sullivan on DFW By Lorin Stein As readers of the Daily know, we don’t publish criticism. But over at his day job, our Southern Editor has written a deep review of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King—a review that is really an essay on Wallace and his peculiar place in American fiction (and nonfiction). Of The Pale King, Sullivan writes: You’d be forgiven for suspecting that a book about random people who work for the government sounds insufferably tedious. The reason it’s not has to do with the word about—it’s the wrong word, the wrong preposition. Wallace doesn’t write about his characters; he hadn’t in a long time. He writes into them. That thing he could do on a tennis court or a cruise ship, or at a porn convention, that made him both an inspiration and a maddening, envy-making presence for the scores like me who learned to do “magazine writing” in his shadow (he was one of those writers who, even when you weren’t sounding like him, made you think about how you weren’t sounding like him)—Wallace liked to do that, in his fiction, with his characters’ interior lives. Imagine walking into a place, say a mega-chain copy shop in a strip mall. It’s early morning, and you’re the first customer. You stop under the bright fluorescents and let the doors glide closed behind you, look at the employees in their corporate-blue shirts, mouths open, shuffling around sleepily. You take them in as a unified image, with an impenetrable surface of vague boredom and dissatisfaction that you’re content to be on the outside of, and you set to your task, to your copying or whatever. That’s precisely the moment when Wallace hits pause, that first little turn into inattention, into self-absorption. He reverses back through it, presses play again. Now it’s different. You’re in a room with a bunch of human beings. Each of them, like you, is broken and has healed in some funny way. Each of them, even the shallowest, has a novel inside. Each is loved by God or deserves to be. They all have something to do with you: When you let the membrane of your consciousness become porous, permit osmosis, you know it to be true, we have something to do with one another, are part of a narrative—but what? Wallace needed very badly to know. And he sensed that the modern world was bombarding us with scenarios, like the inside of the copy shop, where it was easy to forget the question altogether. We “feel lonely in a crowd,” he writes in one of his stories, but we “stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being,” with the result that “we are, always, faces in a crowd.” That’s what I love in Wallace, noticed details like that, microdescriptions of feeling states that seem suggestive of whole branching social super-systems, sentences that make me feel like, Anyone who doesn’t get that is living in a different world. He was the closest thing we had to a recording angel.
March 15, 2011 A Letter from the Editor Sex, Hastily, Then Beignets By Lorin Stein For a long time now, we’ve been thinking that our friends over at The Awl should start a culture diary of their own—and now they have! And with no less an eminence than David Orr, poetry critic of The New York Times Book Review. Hot, hot, hot!
March 2, 2011 A Letter from the Editor Croissant Not Included By Lorin Stein Johnathan Wilhelmi of Everyman Espresso on 13th Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. Wasn’t this a nice morning surprise! Everyman Espresso, in Manhattan’s East Village, is giving away free coffee with every purchase of our winter issue. If you want your local café to stock the Review, tell them to get in touch. We’ll be happy to set them up with an account.
December 6, 2010 A Letter from the Editor Introducing the Winter Issue By Lorin Stein Jonathan Franzen has just given the deepest, most searching and revealing interview of his career. And we don’t mean on Oprah. You won’t find this interview on TV, on YouTube, or anywhere else on the Web. You can only find it in the winter issue of The Paris Review, alongside a startling portfolio, curated by David Salle, of paintings by Amy Sillman and Tom McGrath; a selection of portraits and landscapes by legendary draughtsman Saul Steinberg; and a troubling, sexually charged novella by Hungarian master Péter Nádas. Issue 195, which will hit newsstands December 15, also includes a Writers at Work interview with novelist Louise Erdrich, poems by Brian Blanchfield and Jim Moore, debut fiction by Alexandra Kleeman and Claire Vaye Watkins, and much, much more. Order your copy today—or click here for our holiday gift offer and consider Christmas solved. Happy holidays!
December 2, 2010 A Letter from the Editor East Bay, Left Bank By Lorin Stein First The Paris Magazine, now this! We like to think of The Paris Review as the little magazine that launched a thousand little magazines. And yes, in our book, imaginary magazines count extra. We wish “The Oakland Review” a long and happy life … or at least a superfun night. Just give back the bird once you’ve finished?