September 12, 2017 Bulletin Announcing: Free Pencil Day! By The Paris Review “Sometimes just the pure luxury of long beautiful pencils charges me with energy and invention.” —John Steinbeck, The Art of Fiction No. 45 Pencils are a writer’s best friend—we’ve got sixty-four years of testimonials to prove it. We also have a few extra pencils … which is why we’re offering a special back-to-school offer. Subscribe to The Paris Review and we’ll send you ten Paris Review pencils (no. 2, of course). For one day only—subscribe now! Read More
September 6, 2017 Bulletin Announcing Our New Web Editor By The Paris Review Photo: Kate Kornberg After a month and a half of wandering, rudderless, in the deserts of mixed metaphor, The Paris Review Daily is delighted to welcome its new editor: Nadja Spiegelman. Nadja’s memoir, I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This, was published last year. More recently, she coedited Resist!, a free feminist publication of comics and graphics. A former editor at Toon Books, Nadja has written for New York Magazine, the newyorker.com, Fantastic Man, McSweeney’s, and many others. She also introduced Daily readers to verse in emoji—the first in what we feel sure will be a series of exciting innovations here at your favorite gazette of culture and the arts. Nadja has spent the past five years living in Paris; she will be returning home this week to join us in our Chelsea offices. (Her personal Paris review? Five stars.)
September 5, 2017 Bulletin Announcing Our Fall Issue By The Paris Review In our Fall issue, Malcolm Gladwell discusses his years as an illegal immigrant (and failed right-wing provocateur); Michael Lewis explains how he writes by his family motto (“Do as little as possible”); and David Sedaris weighs the pros and cons of communication with the dead. Also: our longtime Paris editor Maxine Groffsky—who brought John Ashbery and so many others into the pages of the Review–remembers the sixties, with cameos by John Ashbery, Brigitte Bardot, Harry Mathews, George Plimpton, Niki de Saint Phalle, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. (“If we’d been getting money [from the CIA], I would have splurged on typewriter ribbons.”) Plus: fiction by Ann Beattie, Antonio Di Benedetto, Isabella Hammad, and Sigrid Nunez; poems by Peter Gizzi, Patrick Mackie, Ange Mlinko, D. Nurkse, Ezra Pound, Jana Prikryl, Philip Schultz, Frederick Seidel, and Donna Stonecipher; an Art of Fiction interview with Dany Laferrière; and the teenage diaries of Duncan Hannah, high school Casanova. Subscribe now.
June 19, 2017 Bulletin The Case of the Purloined Portrait By Dan Piepenbring The portrait, now recovered. The Paris Review is renowned for our parties, and we take pride in that. But sometimes things get carried away. Literally. As Page Six reports, a party to launch our Summer issue last week was marred by petty larceny: someone absconded with a portrait of Günter Grass drawn by Tomi Ungerer in 1965. Our digital director, Jeffery Gleaves, discovered the theft the next morning, when he noticed a Grass-shaped hole on the bathroom wall. (The portrait, like most of the Review’s valuables, was hanging near the toilet.) If you were here, reader, you may have noticed a single tear roll down Jeff’s cheek, as he vowed to “hunt the vermin down.” Read More
June 13, 2017 Bulletin A Note from Our Editor By Lorin Stein Seven years ago, we opened up the full archive of Paris Review interviews, the famous Writers at Work series, to the public. Since then, millions of readers have enjoyed these in-depth conversations. The New York Times called them “the best party in town.” Now we’re asking our readers to help keep the party going. For less than fifteen cents a day, you can subscribe and keep enjoying full access to our interviews—and to everything else we’ve published in the last sixty-four years. You’ll also get our print edition, containing the smartest, most original fiction, essays, poetry, and interviews of our moment. And by becoming a subscriber, you will help sustain the Review for another sixty-four years. Don’t want to subscribe? Sign up for a weekly selection of interviews, stories, and poems from our archive. Or just keep coming to The Paris Review Daily for independent, irreverent coverage of arts and culture—all of it free. Newsweek recently called The Paris Review “a reminder of the artist’s duty in times of national crisis.” We hope you’ll support the artists—interviewers, poets, novelists, story writers, illustrators, essayists, the whole crew—whose work you love, and who make the Review a vital force in literature today.
June 13, 2017 Bulletin Politics and The Paris Review: Announcing Our Summer Issue By Lorin Stein In the last six or seven months, I’ve heard a lot of talk about the importance of the arts. Maybe you have, too. In certain circles, it’s become a sort of refrain: we need the arts more than ever. In my experience, this has not been—in any obvious or immediate way—the case. Lately I’ve been watching a lot of news. My taste for fiction has narrowed. I’m more impatient. A certain kind of story went stale for me last November. When I read a contemporary writer, I want to be spoken to honestly and intelligently about the times we live in. I realize this is not a new complaint. As luck had it, my colleagues and I spent the election deep in the Paris Review archive. We were revamping our website, and it meant rereading and sorting through all our back issues, hundreds of stories and interviews, thousands of poems, many written in times of upheaval. The more I read, the more I saw them reflect the politics of their time. Read More