September 28, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein H.G. Wells A cultural news roundup. Jewish poet and novelist Emanuel Litvinoff has died at the age of ninety-six. Here, he reads his poem “T. S. Eliot.” A new Bloomsbury imprint will digitally revive out-of-print titles by Edith Sitwell, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Monica Dickens, among others. Julian Assange’s memoir, due to lackluster sales, may soon be out of print. It’s sold fewer than 700 copies. Michael Moore tries to pull his memoir from “murderous Georgia” following the execution of Troy Davis. Reviewers vs. Bloggers. Stephen King gives fans a taste of The Shining sequel. Le fin d’Asterix. The return of The BFG. The sex life of H. G. Wells. Between a rock and a hard place. A visual history of book references in The Simpsons. “Bentley was, however, no ass.”
September 21, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein Gustave Flaubert. Photograph by Nadar.A cultural news roundup. Michel Houellebecq has been found. So has a James M. Cain manuscript. Neil Young is writing an autobiography. So is Jermaine Jackson. So is Julian Assange. But without his consent. “If I say ‘David Bellos has to be one of the smartest people now on the planet,’ what language am I using? English of a kind; but scarcely the Queen’s, which—to judge from her public utterances—retains a careful insularity; mid-Atlantic schtick is not Her Majesty’s bag.” Nor Shakespeare’s. The Sondheim-crossword mother lode. Shakeups at DC Comics … But peace at the Poetry Society. “The general editorial posture of the magazine leaned away from the conventions of the establishment and toward the eccentricities of bohemians everywhere.” Salman Rushdie joins Twitter. “Flaubert once bet some friends that he could make love to a woman, smoke a cigar, and write a letter at the same time. He won, as they looked on in admiration.” These are beautiful, if we do say so ourselves.
September 19, 2011 Bulletin Our Café au Lait Cup—Now for Sale! By Sadie Stein Yes, now our brand-new, limited-edition Paris Review café au lait cup is for sale in our store! We have been drinking from them since they arrived here in the office, and our coffee and tea taste extra scintillating. They also have a satisfying heft. But wait! For just a few dollars more, you can get the cup, plus a full year of fiction, poetry, and interviews. That’s right: four issues of The Paris Review plus the smartest cup in your kitchen. Now, that’s what we call a delicious offer.
September 19, 2011 Bulletin No Sandals Allowed By Lorin Stein We begin the week with a quote from The New York Times Book Review, where Anthony Doerr reviews Denis Johnson—and compares The Paris Review to a giant rock: Sometimes, if you wander long enough out-of-doors, you look up and find yourself in a suddenly devastating place: on a glittering slab of granite, say, hanging a thousand feet above a mountain lake. Your blood quickens, the clouds stretch, the light turns everything to gold and something enters you, shakes you, seizes some root of your soul and pulps it. Maybe you make your way down to the lake for a swim, or just sit beneath the sky for an hour, dazzled, but what lasts is the feeling that you have found something important, something precious, something that would be world-renowned if only it weren’t so hard to find. It’s a proprietary feeling, too, when you find a place—or a song, or a painting, or a sandwich—that you love, that moves you. You want to share it with only a few other souls, believers, maniacs, folks who won’t trample on it. Because who wants to see her sacred meadow flattened by the sandals of tourists? I first read Denis Johnson’s novella “Train Dreams” in a bright orange 2002 issue of The Paris Review and felt that old thrill of discovery … It’s a love story, a hermit’s story and a refashioning of age-old wolf-based folklore like “Little Red Cap.” It’s also a small masterpiece. You look up from the thing dazed, slightly changed. Click here to own the bright orange issue in question and here to subscribe.
September 14, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein Portrait of Roald Dahl, 1954, by Carl Van Vechten. A cultural news roundup. William Sleator, a well-loved author of young-adult science fiction and fantasy, has died at sixty-six. “Of course, buzzwords come and go. But it’s striking that 9/11 and its aftereffects have left almost no traces in the language of everyday life.” Walk a mile in J. K. Rowling’s boots. “Rowling, who famously guards her privacy, is one of a number of prominent public figures expected to give evidence to Lord Justice Leveson’s judicial inquiry into phone hacking and media ethics and practices.” In response to the BBC’s plans to cut short fiction, prominent authors embark on a tweetathon. Not to be confused with the ambitious Sixty-Six Books Twitter project. Chinua Achebe vs. 50 Cent. A single Salinger sentence sells for $50,000. The Amazon digital-book library marches on. Happy ninety-fifth birthday, Roald Dahl. A birthday appeal to save the late author’s writing hut is controversial. The college experience, sans tuition. Remembering comics author Del Connell.
September 12, 2011 Bulletin Our New Café au Lait Cup in Action! By Sadie Stein The brand-spanking-new Paris Review café au lait cup has arrived in our offices, and we couldn’t wait to show it off. Needless to say, it’s the perfect companion to our fall issue, shortly available wherever fine books are sold.