August 30, 2010 From the Archive Happy Birthday R. Crumb By Caitlin Roper In honor of R. Crumb’s birthday today, here are a few of my favorite outtakes from his interview, the first Art of Comics, which appears in our summer issue, still on newsstands. Interviewer Ted Widmer asks Crumb how he feels about publishing hardcover books: INTERVIEWERYou’ve taken what was a medium of thirty pages of flimsy, low quality paper with a paper cover and now you’ve conquered the hardcover book format. CRUMBReluctantly. I love the old, cheap comic book format so much because the format itself is a statement. It keeps you from becoming too pretentious. I like that about it. Keep it cheap and low-grade, the format, keep it cheap and accessible and then you’re not required to be overly artistic or have overly deep, profound meaning or whatever, you know, all that stuff that can make you very self-conscious. I got reluctantly dragged into hardcover books. INTERVIEWERBut I think your fans are happy that those hardcover books exist because you would have to be a maniacal collector to get all of your stuff otherwise. It’s basically impossible to find back issues of The East Village Other, but for hardly any money you can buy The R. Crumb Handbook and see your greatest hits. CRUMBYeah, that’s true. And also, the whole context of cheaply produced comic books is gone, basically. All those newsstands, that kind of distribution is gone. In June we posted a slideshow of Crumb self-portraits. My favorite is the one where he’s squinching up his nose to keep his glasses on his face. I love Crumb’s answer to Widmer about his next projects: INTERVIEWERDo you see a sequence of more literary stories coming out? You’ve done some Samuel Johnson, Philip K. Dick. CRUMBThe classics illustrated. I did a sequence from Nausea by Sartre a couple of years ago. I did a couple of other things like that. I have lots of ideas about stuff like that but there’s always so much work in it, it’s so time consuming. I’m getting old, you know.
August 27, 2010 From the Archive Friendships from The Paris Review By Thessaly La Force Here’s a short and lovely video for a Friday afternoon. Rose Styron, the wife of the late William Styron, recalls the earlier days of The Paris Review, and the parties that the Styrons used to throw. “We had the John Marquands,” she says, “The Peter Matthiessens, the Tom Guinzburgs, and George Plimpton. We were all a gang, and had a wonderful time.” What a vibrant literary life! And what friendships! Her memories remind me of the touching speech Philip Roth gave at our Revel this year to accept the Hadada Award. Roth describes his first visit to New York to meet Plimpton, and how he made friends with the magazine’s young editors and writers. The result? “This time I sent my story not to The Paris Review slush pile, from which I’d been plucked first time around by none other than Rose Styron, but right to the top.”
July 28, 2010 From the Archive Congratulations to Damon Galgut By Lorin Stein The Paris Review wishes to congratulate our contributor Damon Galgut, whose novel In a Strange Room has been nominated for the MAN Booker Prize. Click here to read the excerpt that ran in the Winter 2008 issue of The Paris Review.
July 7, 2010 From the Archive Before There Was Twilight, There Was Dusk By Christopher Cox Add James Salter’s Dusk to the list of genius reissues coming out this year. Modern Library has put out a handsome new edition of the story collection, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award when it first appeared in 1988. (If songs from 1988 can be called oldies, then a book from the same year definitely qualifies as a classic reissue.) Dusk had been out of print for many years, so the new edition is a godsend for those of us who don’t have the original issues of Esquire, Grand Street, and, ahem, The Paris Review lying around. Four of the stories in Dusk first appeared in our pages, and to celebrate the return of a great book, we’ve put the full text of “Am Strande von Tanger,” the lead-off story in the collection, online here. That story is forty-two years old, and it’s still not showing any signs of age.
July 2, 2010 From the Archive Congratulations to Barbara Demick By Christopher Cox Barbara Demick wrote an excellent book about North Korea, Nothing To Envy, that has just won the BBC’s Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction. Demick interviewed dozens of defectors from the North during the years she spent living in Seoul, and the book follows the lives of six of them as they struggle to survive in Kim Jong Il’s crumbling police state. In our fall issue last year, Demick told the story of two of those defectors, Mi-ran and Jun-sang, who fell in love in North Korea but defected south without telling each other. Here’s how she sets the scene for their love affair: The night sky in North Korea might be the most brilliant in northeast Asia, the only airspace spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent. And no electrical glow competes with the intensity of the stars there. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea’s power stations rusted into ruin. The lights went out. Now when the sun drops low in the sky, the landscape fades to gray and the squat little houses are swallowed by the night. Entire villages vanish into the dusk. Even in parts of Pyongyang, the capital, you can stroll down the middle of a street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side. Such darkness is a curse, of course, but it also has its advantages. If you are a teenager dating somebody you can’t be seen with, invisibility confers measures of privacy and freedom that are hard to come by in North Korea. You can do what you like without worrying about the eyes of parents, neighbors, or the secret police. You can read a little bit more here, but you have to either buy the book or the Fall 2009 issue to get the full story.
June 11, 2010 From the Archive Wells Tower Wins Young Lions Fiction Award By Christopher Cox Congratulations to Wells Tower, whose short-story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award last night. Tower’s first two published stories were picked from the slush pile by The Paris Review way back in 2001, and both showcased what Edmund White called the “tensile strength” of his style. “His range is wide,” wrote White, “and his language impeccable, never strained or fussy.” You can hear Tower read the first of the two stories we published, “Down through the Valley,” by clicking here.