August 5, 2013 Bulletin Short Story By Sadie Stein Check out those shorts second from the right. Your eyes do not deceive you: that is indeed the very same 1953 William Pène du Bois cityscape that graces the inside cover of your issue of The Paris Review. It’s one of four designs, taken from our archive, to be found on these limited-edition swim trunks (which could also, of course, just be worn as shorts). Produced in collaboration with Barneys New York and Orlebar Brown to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of The Paris Review, they can be found in our shop. With each purchase, you will receive a one-year subscription. (L-R: Kim MacConnel, Summer 1980; Donald Sultan, Summer 1996; William Pène du Bois, Spring 1953; Leanne Shapton, Spring 2011.)
July 10, 2013 Bulletin Mark Your Calendars! By Sadie Stein Tomorrow, our own Hailey Gates will be reading at not one but two events in Manhattan. At 6:30 P.M., catch her reading her own work at the Fleur du Mal popup at Clic Gallery (255 Centre Street). Come 7:30 P.M., we’ll be heading over to Le Poisson Rouge (158 Bleecker Street), where she’ll be representing the Review at Gelf Magazine’s Varsity Letters sportswriting series. The theme is amateur night, and what discussion of participatory amateur sports journalism would be complete without George Plimpton? Hailey will read from his essays on boxing. See you there!
June 26, 2013 Bulletin A Space Odyssey By Sadie Stein You will be relieved to learn that Arthur C. Clarke’s DNA is going where no man has gone before. Prior to his 2008 death, the science fiction legend graciously donated several strands of hair to NASA’s “first ever solar sail mission into deep space.” The craft, named Sunjammer, after a 1964 Clarke story, will launch in 2014, with hair aboard.
June 3, 2013 Bulletin A Girl with a Mind By Sadie Stein The Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize) has a new partner: Baileys, the Original Irish Cream Liquor. Quoth Kate Mosse, Chair of the Women’s Prize for Fiction board, “We were impressed not only by the scale of their ambition, but also their passion for celebrating outstanding fiction by women and willingness to help in bringing the prize to ever wider audiences.” This we do know: they have long celebrated the fiction that beautiful women constantly drink large glasses of Baileys on the rocks. But we’re happy to see the prize getting sponsorship—at least through 2017.
May 29, 2013 Bulletin Plimpton! and Bobby By Sadie Stein Writes filmmaker Tom Bean, George and Robert Kennedy were close friends for many years, and their relationship weaves into George’s story in interesting ways. Bobby had encouraged George to marry his first wife, Freddy, while they were all traveling on the ’68 presidential campaign together (George was making appearances and speeches on behalf of the campaign). Later, when Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, George dove on the attacker and helped disarm him. We spoke with Robert Kennedy Jr. about his memories of George’s relationship with his parents, and I think he perfectly articulated George’s love of adventure and his whole-hearted embrace of life. Plimpton! is playing at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center.
May 28, 2013 Bulletin Announcing Our Summer Issue! By Lorin Stein The proofs of our Summer issue just arrived at Twenty-Seventh Street from the printer. This afternoon is our last chance to catch any mistakes. You always find a few typos—and we have more names to spell-check than usual, because this issue contains more stories, poems, and interviews than any in recent memory. Some of these writers are regular contributors, including Lydia Davis—with her first publication since she won the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for fiction—and David Gates, whose new story is a favorite of his and ours. Others are writers we’ve been waiting to publish for a while, namely Ben Lerner, whose first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, is one of the best debuts we’ve seen in the past few years, and Kristin Dombek, whose essays in n+1 electrified us. The newly translated stories by Robert Walser are from his groundbreaking 1904 collection, Fritz Kocher’s Essays. This book (which won the admiration of Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin) made me feel for the first time that I understood what all the fuss is about. Still others, including Emma Cline, Gillian Linden, and the Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli—translated by the likes of Jorie Graham and Mark Strand—are new to us and will probably be new to you. We look forward to saying, You read them here first. Plus, three interviews. Two are devoted to the art of literary biography. Michael Holroyd’s lives of Lytton Strachey and George Bernard Shaw, among others, revolutionized the study of Bloomsbury and Edwardian literary history. MICHAEL HOLROYD I am a great believer in private life, which is quite unfashionable now—to be a celebrity is the thing, or you are nothing. But I believe in private life for the living, and I think that when one is dead one should be a little bit bolder, so that the rest of us may have some record of how things actually were. Otherwise we will be left with well-meant lies, which add to the difficulties of life and lead to real misunderstanding. Hermione Lee’s biographies of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton are just as influential. INTERVIEWER What is it like to write a death scene? HERMIONE LEE It depends how they died. Some cynical biographer said to me, Make sure it’s a good death. Make sure you’re not picking someone who just declined. Finally, we have an Art of Fiction interview with the Nobel laureate Imre Kertész. It is, according to Kertész, the last interview he will ever give. Luisa Zielinski’s probing, sensitive questions explore the reasons that Kertész—ten years after he survived the Holocaust—decided he had to write. IMRE KERTÉSZ Look, I don’t want to deny that I was a prisoner at Auschwitz and that I now have a Nobel Prize. What should I make of that? And what should I make of the fact that I survived, and continue to survive? At least I feel that I experienced something extraordinary, because not only did I live through those horrors, but I also managed to describe them, in a way that is bearable, acceptable, and nonetheless part of [a] radical tradition … Perhaps I’m being impertinent, but I feel that my work has a rare quality—I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read. Subscribe now!