September 23, 2010 Events Tonight: Lorin Stein Chats with Jean-Christophe Valtat By The Paris Review Tonight, at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, Paris Review darling Jean-Christophe Valtat will be reading from his recent novels Aurorarama and 03, and discussing his work with Lorin Stein and Mitzi Angel, the translator of 03. The event begins at 7 P.M. at 58 West 10th Street—please come if you can!
September 14, 2010 Events Lit Crawl: Sneak Peek of Issue 194 By The Paris Review This Saturday, The Paris Review unveiled its fall issue at Fontana’s. Photographs by Wesley Chen.
July 19, 2010 Events Tonight: Celebrate Our Summer Issue By Caitlin Roper Issue contributors Colum McCann and Victor LaValle will read tonight at The Half King for our last event to celebrate the current issue. There will be a Q&A, drinks, and fun. We look forward to seeing you! The Half King 505 West 23rd Street, at 10th Avenue 7:00 P.M.
June 8, 2010 Events Department of Corrections By Caitlin Roper Even Roth once dreamed of the jackpot. Thank you, Mike Leaverton, for your notice in SF Weekly about our event at The Booksmith in San Francisco next Monday, June 14. (Hope to see you there!) And thank you, too, for the opportunity to clarify a few things about the legend of the Paris Review slush pile. Your version went like this: The Paris Review throws all unsolicited submissions, three-pointer style, into an ancient, fire-belching potbellied stove, which a soot-covered intern, such as Philip Roth (Summer, 1946) or Don DeLillo (Fall, 1952), keeps eternally lit for this very purpose. While we do receive more than a thousand fiction submissions every month, we don’t use them to heat our office, or to play trash-can basketball. We read them all, every single one, before burning (or sending back via SASE). In fact, the summer issue, which hits newsstands and mailboxes next week, includes a story, “Elk Stalled in Snow,” by Chaz Reetz-Laiolo, who came to our attention through a slush submission. Mr. Reetz-Laiolo will join me at The Booksmith on Monday night, along with photographer Jeff Antebi and poet Matthew Zapruder. And just one more thing: Philip Roth was never a Paris Review intern. But his story, “Conversion of the Jews,” was plucked from, yes, the slush pile, by Rose Styron in 1958. The odds might be long but, like you, we’re always dreaming of the jackpot.
June 8, 2010 Events Lena Herzog and the Lost Souls By The Paris Review “We do not allow anyone to see it, let alone photograph it,” the director of Vienna’s Federal Museum of Pathology at the Narrenturm told Lena Herzog when she first attempted to visit. Herzog was drawn to the collection of what eighteenth-century monks in her native Russia called “lost souls,” and what nineteenth-century doctors described as “incompatible with life”—unborn fetuses and newborn infants who, by virtue of nature’s mutations, were unable to survive but who were preserved by early modern collectors as objects of scientific inquiry and private wonder. These human and animal specimens were often displayed next to maps of the earth and of the stars—evidence of a desire to define boundaries and map the unknown. Herzog first encountered a similar collection as a student in St. Petersburg in 1988, and her reaction was swift and clear: “What I saw was extraordinary and subversive. It defied belief … The Russian Orthodox church declared the souls of these babies ‘lost’—they had no place in hell, or heaven, or even limbo. They were dead on arrival and had no place to go. Yet what was in the jars shimmered with a strange beauty.” For Herzog, that strange beauty is “something that shocks with a promise of some answer but gives none.” After the jump, a selection of photos that were first published in this magazine. Tonight, Lena Herzog will appear in conversation with Lawrence Weschler at The New York Public Library. Read More