January 28, 2013 In Memoriam Richard G. Stern, 1928–2013 By The Paris Review We mourn the loss of Richard Stern, a lion of the literary world whose name was little known outside the den. He established himself as a nurturing teacher and a powerful force in literature at the University of Chicago, where, while writing, he taught English and creative writing from 1955 until his retirement in 2001. In Stern’s New York Times obituary, Philip Roth recalls meeting Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Norman Mailer in Stern’s U of C classroom. During his tenure at the school, Stern was awarded the Medal of Merit for the Novel by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 1986. He published fiction, short stories, and essays prolifically, appearing in The Paris Review four times, across a span of almost thirty years. The second of these occurrences, from Issue 66 (Summer 1976), was the story “Aurelia Frequenzia Reveals the Heart and Mind of the Man of Destiny,” a brief and disorienting vignette about the interview of a mysterious Vietnamese ex-politician by a French journalist. Marked by a strong current of anxiety and paranoia, tension builds and builds until an abrupt and surprising resolution. It is representative of the work he shared with us.
January 22, 2013 In Memoriam The Eye of the Storm By Rex Weiner Alan Shenker, an artist known among the underground cartoonists of the late sixties as Yossarian, died last week, in New York, at the age of sixty-seven. Born in Levittown, he was a downtown habitué and his work was published in the East Village Other, among many other publications of the era. A kind of ruthless patricide was implicit in Yossarian’s cover art for the February 1972 issue of the New York ACE. He was close to “the Arab,” as the East Village Other’s editor, Yaakov Kohn, was known, and now Yossarian was one of the defectors from the already tottering EVO to the new paper which I’d cofounded with Robert “Honest Bob” Singer. Read More
January 10, 2013 In Memoriam In Memoriam: Evan S. Connell, 1924–2013 By Lorin Stein We are sad to learn that Evan Connell has died. An early contributor to The Paris Review, Connell was and is a quiet hero of contemporary literature. His novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge have been cited as a crucial influence by writers as different as Lydia Davis, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith. In his history books—Son of the Morning Star (about General Custer) and Deus Lo Volt! (about the Crusades)—his poems, and his essays, he sang the glories of lost civilizations and unearthed the ruins at our feet. Connell delighted in tales of folly, of doomed experiments, but his own experiments bore fruits, plural, for no two are alike. We regret that Connell was unable to finish his Art of Fiction interview for the magazine; stay tuned in the next few days for selections from his work as it appeared in The Paris Review.
January 9, 2013 In Memoriam In Memoriam: Harvey Shapiro, 1924–2013 By Sadie Stein Harvey Shapiro, poet and editor, died on Monday at eighty-eight. The following ran in The Paris Review No. 84, Summer 1982. On A Sunday When you write something you want it to live— you have that obligation, to give it a start in life. Virginia Woolf, pockets full of stones, sinks into the sad river that surrounds us daily. Everything about London amazed her, the shapes and sight, the conversations on a bus. At the end of her life, she said London is my patriotism. I feel that about New York. Would Frank O’Hara say Virginia Woolf, get up? No, but images from her novels stay in my head—the old poet (Swinburne, I suppose) sits on the lawn of the countryhouse, mumbling into the sun. Pleased with the images, I won’t let the chaos of my life overwhelm me. There is the City, and the sun blazes on Central Park in September. These people on a Sunday are beautiful, various. And the poor among them make me think the experience I knew will be relived again, so that my sentences will keep hold of reality, for a while at least.
December 11, 2012 In Memoriam Fyodor Khitruk, 1917–2012 By Sadie Stein The pioneering Russian animator Fyodor Khitruk has died at age ninety-five. Perhaps best known for his adaptations of A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories, Khitru’s work was often political and avant-garde. 1973’s Island, below, won the Palme d’Or for best short.
November 13, 2012 In Memoriam Jack Gilbert, 1925–2012 By Sadie Stein “Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations. That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life?” —The Art of Poetry No. 91