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.
September 7, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein Mark Twain. A study finds that reading fiction may improve empathy. Carol Ann Duffy: “Poems are a form of texting.” Language fail. The Man-Booker shortlist is announced. Herewith, a cheat sheet. Philip Schultz: “[My tutor] worked with me to try to teach me how to read, without any success at all. And one day out of frustration asked me what I thought I was going to do in life if I couldn’t read. And surprising both of us, I said I wanted to be a writer. And he laughed.” Mark Twain’s charming love letter. On bookshelf aesthetics. Feral is having a moment. A new Wuthering Heights adaptation is “caked in grime and damp with saliva.” Oh, and “salted with profanity.” Ten years on, reading 9/11. Profanisaurus? There’s an app for that. George R. R. Martin, fanboy. Haunting images of America’s asylums.
September 6, 2011 Bulletin Talking Dirty with Our Fall Issue By Sadie Stein It avails not, neither earthquake nor hurricane nor suspended subway service— The Paris Review comes out on time. It’s a doozy, if we say so ourselves, and not to be missed. Subscribe now, or renew, and receive a limited-edition Paris Review café au lait cup. You can sip in style while you enjoy a full year of fiction, poetry, and prose. In the fall issue: Nicholson Baker discusses the pleasures of writing smut: Sexual arousal itself is a kind of drug. It has also turned out to be one of the few plots I can actually handle. If I imagine a man and a woman talking, and I know that later on they’re going to be taking some of their clothes off, that pulls me merrily along … The basic boy-meets-girl plot in which they talk a little bit and then they have some kind of slightly bizarre sex—that plot I can do. Other plots are harder. Terry Castle collects strangers’ children: So many children—most of them obnoxious-looking. It’s a fact: 99 percent of all photographs ever taken have little brats in them. Mugging, leering, pushing one another. Wielding fearsome Betsy Wetsy 147 dolls. Pouting in pajamas on the floor over unsatisfactory Christmas presents. Prancing egotistically. The sort of kids that Wittgenstein, back when he was a mean, half-demented schoolmaster in the Austrian Alps or wherever it was—long before Cambridge and the Tractatus—would have walloped upside the head and thrown in the snow. How is it, indeed, that I have so many of them? More, even, than Joyce Carol Oates has written novels. And not one, needless to say, did I get for free. Plus … Geoff Dyer on Tarkovsky. Lydia Davis on translating Flaubert. The Dennis Cooper interview. Fiction by Roberto Bolaño and newcomer Kerry Howley. Poems by Sharon Olds, Brenda Shaughnessy, Constantine P. Cavafy, Paul Muldoon, Jeff Dolven, Meghan O’Rourke, and Forrest Gander. Subscribe now!