November 8, 2010 A Letter from the Editor Houellebecq Wins Goncourt By Lorin Stein Michel Houellebecq has finally received the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize. As Susannah Hunnewell suggested in our current issue, the honor is overdue. Click here to read the most in-depth interview with Houellebecq available in English. As our diarist Nelly Kaprielian reported last September in The Paris Review Daily, Houellebecq is still living hard. He has aged visibly in the last couple of years. He even tells her that his latest novel, La carte et le territoire, may be his last. We hope and trust that time will prove him wrong. In the meantime, we send our most heartfelt congratulations.
October 28, 2010 A Letter from the Editor 2010 Whiting Writers’ Awards By Lorin Stein Last night, ten writers “of exceptional talent and promise in early career” received $50,000 each from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. We proudly lay claim to two of them: Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, whose story, “Most Livable City,” appeared our spring 2006 issue; and our special Dostoevsky correspondent, Elif Batuman. In his speech congratulating the winners, The Paris Review’s own Peter Matthiessen spoke from experience, counseling novelists in the crowd to intersperse their fiction with gigs that get them out into the world. He also reminisced about the early days of the Review with much sympathy—if not consolation—for young writers facing the sophomore slump. We add our congratulations to his!
September 13, 2010 A Letter from the Editor GET READY By Lorin Stein Two days to go before we officially launch the fall issue—and with it, the redesigned Paris Review. We are told that copies have already arrived at a bookstore near us. Maybe also at one near you. For the curious, the contents include: interviews with Michel Houellebecq and Norman Rush fiction by Lydia Davis, Sam Lipsyte, and newcomer April Ayers Lawson essays by J. D. Daniels and John Jeremiah Sullivan poems by Carol Muske-Dukes, Dorothea Lasky, Frederick Seidel, John Tranter, Mark Ford, Daniel Bosch, Charles Harper Webb, and the late, great Giacomo Leopardi artworks by Tauba Auerbach and Colter Jacobsen We’ll be telling you more about these people, and showing you some of their work, over the next few weeks. But … it’s never too soon to subscribe!
June 22, 2010 A Letter from the Editor New Poetry Editor By Lorin Stein We are delighted to announce that Robyn Creswell will join our masthead this fall as poetry editor. A critic, translator, and scholar, Robyn has written about contemporary poetry and fiction for Harper‘s magazine, The Nation, Raritan, n+1, and other magazines. His translation of Abdelfattah Kilito’s novel The Clash of Images will appear this fall from New Directions. “I’m thrilled to join The Paris Review as poetry editor,” Robyn writes. “The Review is one of the most vital organs of American literary culture, and its poetry section has always been a place where emerging as well as established poets have their say. It’s exciting to become part of a magazine that has published the whole spectrum of brilliance from John Ashbery to Amy Clampitt, from Charles Olson to Anne Carson. The Review also has an impressive history of publishing translations of the best poets from abroad, and I look forward to continuing that tradition.” Meghan O’Rourke and Dan Chiasson—who have done wonders as co-editors of our poetry section—will remain with the Review as advisory editors. In their words: “After a five-year tenure as poetry editors, it seemed an opportune time to turn back to our own work while continuing an informal and broad-ranging relationship with the new Review. Becoming advisory editors allows us to do that. Of course, one of the things we hope to give some advice on, when it’s wanted, is poetry.” In the short term, stay tuned to The Paris Review Daily for an exchange between Meghan and Dan about Matthew Zapruder’s astonishing long poem “Come On All You Ghosts.” In the long term, our editors hope to bring you not just the best poems, but also lively commentary on those poems, and to help them find the readership they deserve.
June 10, 2010 A Letter from the Editor Summer Issue 193 By Caitlin Roper 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 between Philip Gourevitch and me. Issue 193 is her editorial handiwork. —Lorin Stein It’s been thrilling to put together an issue, and to do it with my sharp, talented colleagues, Christopher Cox and David Wallace-Wells. It’s strange now to see this issue, which we’ve been working on for a few months, finally sprout legs and amble out into the world to meet its readers. There’s a story, “Rhonda Discovers Art,” by Katherine Dunn, that I can’t wait for you to read. I think passionate fans of Geek Love will not be disappointed; Dunn is still as twisted and as genius as she was in 1989. The summer issue also includes a stunning portfolio by Jeff Antebi of bonfires shot at night in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He says, “the fires seem almost like sentient creatures coming alive of their own free will, and staying awake as long as they care to.” Did you know that R. Crumb saw God in a dream in 2000? It’s true. He talks to Ted Widmer about his vision, his work habits, his influences—from early TV to Norman Rockwell, LSD to Donald Duck—in the first Art of Comics interview in our fifty-seven-year history. I won’t rattle off the entire TOC, but I hope you enjoy the issue. It’s full of surprises.
June 4, 2010 A Letter from the Editor The New Yorker 20 By Lorin Stein Meeting of young writers who write for children newspaper Yamde liy. Chapeau! to the Parisians among the newly announced New Yorker 20. Chris Adrian, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nell Freudenberger, Nicole Krauss, Yiyun Li, and Wells Tower—we salute you! Further chapeaux to our colleagues at The New Yorker for assembling the thing. We can hardly imagine a more thankless task. Here on White Street each of us can name writers we think should be on there, and aren’t, and others who leave us scratching our heads. (And yet, weirdly, no two of us name the same people.) Multiply that by a million subscribers, or whatever no-doubt-large fraction reads the stories … that’s a lot of Monday-evening quarterbacks. Even on a normal week, it’s got to be tough finding stories that could conceivably interest a million different readers. In this case, there’s no falling back on household names, since with the exception of Mr. Foer, our micro generation hasn’t produced one. For reasons that may have something to do with writing programs, or Microsoft Word, or Grand Theft Auto, or just three generations of TV, we thirty-something Americans tend to languish in a protracted adolescence on the fiction-producing front. The pool of really bankable youngsters gets smaller with each passing decade, even as book and magazine publishers get more and more desperate for a bona-fide literary star. (No wonder Team Eustace has drafted a ringer from north of the border. Congratulations, Bezmozgis! The flag pin’s in the mail!) Most of the New Yorker 20 are at work on their second or third book. It is, as David Remnick told The New York Times, “a group of promise.” May their greatest achievements lie before them, may the Muses light their way, and may the winds of fortune remain at their backs!