January 31, 2014 Bulletin We’re Telling You for the Last Time By Dan Piepenbring Photo: eefeewahfah, via Flickr Last call! Our subscription deal with McSweeney’s ends at midnight tonight. As you now probably know by heart, you can get a full year of McSweeney’s and The Paris Review for just $75, a 20 percent savings on all the interviews, fiction, essays, art, poetry, and humor a discerning reader could want. The end of January grows nigh. Has the promise of the new year already lost its luster? Has your resolve faltered vis-à-vis exercise, temperance, or chastity? Don’t fret. With this deal, you still have time—not much, though—to stoke the embers of hope and change in your life. Take it from us: we’ve kept our resolutions. And you can, too—at least until the stroke of midnight, when February begins and our offer vanishes, like so many human ambitions, into the sands of time. Subscribe now! You won’t be sorry.
January 30, 2014 Bulletin Time Is Running Out By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Chris Willis, via Wikimedia Commons Today is many things: Vanessa Redgrave’s birthday; the 365th anniversary of Charles I’s beheading; a Thursday. But more than any of these, it’s the penultimate day of our subscription deal with McSweeney’s. You must, in the parlance of infomercials and World War II propaganda, ACT NOW, BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE! To refresh your memory: this January only, you can get a year of The Paris Review and McSweeney’s for just $75*—a twenty percent savings over individual subscriptions. It’s what known among businessmen as synergy, and among laypeople as a totally white-hot deal. Yes, our two magazines have always appealed to different readers. Our sensibilities, like our headquarters, are a continent apart. But for 2014 we say, vive la différence. You’ll have the most cosmopolitan bookshelf, nightstand, or bathroom on the block, and a full supply of the interviews, fiction, essays, poetry, and humor that keep us reading each other and make us want to spread the love! Subscribe now or risk infinite regret! *US only.
January 23, 2014 Bulletin Save Rizzoli By Dan Piepenbring Since 1985, Manhattan’s Rizzoli Bookstore has occupied a spectacular six-story limestone townhouse on Fifty-Seventh Street—their Web site aptly goes in for a bit of self-congratulation, touting the “cast iron chandeliers, ornately decorated vaulting, and a luminous Diocletian window.” You can learn more about the history of the building here. It’s the sort of place that inspires breathless exaltation in book lovers, or even merely book likers; if you were to publish a magazine of bookseller porn, Rizzoli would be the centerfold. Put more baldly, it’s magical. Alas, in a plot turn that seems ripped from a bad movie, realtors have designs on the building—they want to demolish it and build a high-rise. One can only imagine the cackles that issue from their inner sanctum with so many malignant plumes of cigar smoke. But fear not. Citizens have come together, as we are wont to do, to preserve Rizzoli as a landmark. Sign the petition to help save it, and, as a bonus, to ensure that these dastardly realtors are left stomping their finely crafted hats.
January 13, 2014 Bulletin Congratulations to Jonathan Franzen By Dan Piepenbring Oskar Kokoschka’s 1925 portrait of Karl Kraus. Oil on canvas, 65 x 100 cm, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna. The Kraus Project, Jonathan Franzen’s translation of three essays by the late Austrian writer Karl Kraus, has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award in criticism. An excerpt from the book, “Against Heine,” appeared in our Fall 2013 issue, and several excerpts of that excerpt—meta-excerpts, if you will—made their way here to the Daily. Winners will be announced on March 13; until then, to prevent the suspense from killing, maiming, or even laying a finger on you, breathe deeply and read Franzen’s expansive notes on “the anal-retentive preciousness” of John Updike’s prose; the externalities of Salinger’s appeal to young readers; the difficulties of translating German travel humor; and the proper way to inflect harsh. And keep your fingers crossed!
January 9, 2014 Bulletin Our New Year’s Resolution: Be More Assertive By Dan Piepenbring Library of Congress Sometimes it’s hard to say how you really feel. You want to be accommodating. You want to be kind. Above all, you want to be liked, but nobody likes a pushover. This is the year to stick up for yourself! We intend to lead by example. Just last week, for instance, some wise guy tweeted, “They can’t fool me. Everyone knows The Paris Review has been just a McSweeney’s Twitter sock-puppet since Plimpton passed away.” Well, that sort of hurt our feelings. We let it slide at the time, but now we’ve grown a pair—AND WE ARE NOT A PUPPET! True, we’ve been touting our subscription deal with McSweeney’s for a week now. We’ve been tireless, not to say relentless, in promoting our association with that fine publication. Why? Not because we’re pushovers, but because—and this is the sound of a literary magazine putting its pedigreed, pedicured, sixty-year-old foot down—it’s one hell of a deal. Think about it. For just $75, you get a full year of McSweeney’s and The Paris Review—that’s a 20 percent savings on all the interviews, fiction, essays, art, poetry, and humor a discerning reader could want. Subscribe now!
January 7, 2014 Bulletin Our New Year’s Resolution: Try New Things By Dan Piepenbring Variety, it’s said, is the spice of life, and too often our lives are sparingly seasoned—not with fennel seed or ancho chile powder, but with a few grains of table salt, iodized if we’re lucky. On a water cracker. But a new year is upon us, and we intend to try new things: like duck larb, or sweetbreads in mole, or Alsatian choucroute garnie. Sure, The Paris Review is reliable: with the best in fiction, interviews, poetry, and art, plus three National Magazine Awards in the last five years, we prefer to think of ourselves as sturdy, not stodgy. But in terms of variety, it’s hard to beat McSweeney’s, whose every issue is a veritable jack-in-the-box of unpredictability. Where we hew to the tried and true—same trim size, same typeface—at McSweeney’s these things are subject to change without notice. 2005’s “Made to Look Like It Came in Your Mailbox” issue was just that; winter 2010 came in a large box illustrated with a very rubicund head; and their most recent offering, “Multiples,” features up to six different versions of twelve stories. Clearly, then, the most variety of all would come from reading both our magazines. That’s why, through January, we’re offering a subscription deal: you can get McSweeney’s and The Paris Review for just $75, a 20 percent savings. That’s more than a lot of new things—it’s a flavor explosion. (Caveat emptor: though we can’t speak for McSweeney’s, we feel comfortable saying our publication will never be literally edible.)