August 4, 2011 In Memoriam Blair Fuller, Editor Emeritus By The Paris Review Courtesy Lynn Schnitzer, Dillon Beach Photography. Blair Fuller was an editor emeritus of The Paris Review and the author of two novels, A Far Place and Zebina’s Mountain, as well as Art in the Blood: Seven Generations of American Artists in the Fuller Family. Born in New York to a family of artists, architects, and publishers, he became an editor at The Paris Review shortly after it was founded. He moved to California in the early sixties, where he taught in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program and went on to cofound the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. He died on July 23, at the age of eighty-four. Blair went out of his way to welcome the current staff of the Review and to support the new tack of the magazine. He read each issue cover to cover and was quick with both praise and criticism: “The Levé piece is my favorite. I feel badly that he ended his life. An interesting and original man … I wish Beattie could be trimmed a bit. Bolaño never did grip me. Otherwise a fine issue.” His first response to the Daily was typically forthright: “What a terrible idea!” Eventually he softened and even sent several reminiscences (he called them “memories”) as possible contributions to the blog. In June, he sent us these two snapshots from the early days (and nights) of the Review. IN PARIS IN THE LATE 1940s, Harold “Doc” Humes had published a magazine, The Paris News-Post, which was intended to tell the Americans who were arriving in large numbers to work for the European recovery effort what they should see, do, and buy in France. Few, however, bought the News. Read More
March 2, 2011 In Memoriam Open City By Lorin Stein We are all very sad to hear that Open City magazine has closed up shop after twenty years of downtown glory. We looked up to them as big brothers- and sisters-in-arms. As Thessaly put it just now, every issue got you on its wavelength—and that wavelength was a good place to be. Open City introduced many of us to writers like David Berman, Sam Lipsyte, Samantha Gillison, and Mary Gaitskill (not to mention Open City editors Thomas Beller, Daniel Pinchbeck, and Robert Bingham). It was the epitome of cool, from its design to the mix of fiction and poetry in its pages to its rent parties (price of admission: one copy). Even the readings were cool—as cool as the Aqua Velva eyes of head editor Joanna Yas. (We hope and trust another magazine will put those eyes to use, and fast.) The good news is that Open City Books will stay in business. The backlist may be small, but with early works by Berman, Lipsyte, Edward St. Aubyn, it is mighty indeed. We look forward to Open City Books’ next publication: Lara Vapnyar’s novel The Smell of Pine.
January 21, 2011 In Memoriam Reynolds Price By Natalie Jacoby Photograph by D. L. Anderson Yesterday, we learned that Reynolds Price had passed away following complications from a heart attack on Sunday. Price set all of his books in his home state of North Carolina, where he also taught at Duke University for more than fifty years. In his 1991 interview with The Paris Review, Price discussed his process as a writer: First, my eyes are my primary teachers. And I assume that this is true for a vast percentage of the human race, certainly for the entire sighted portion. For us, the world enters there—it mainly enters my mind through my eyes, and I make of it what I will and can. The granary, the silo—my garnered experience—begins as stored visual observation … I love to watch the world, and that visual experience becomes, in a way I couldn’t begin to chart or describe, the knowledge I possess; that knowledge produces whatever it is that I write. From the very beginning of my serious adult work, when I was a senior in college, my writing has emerged by a process over which I have almost no more conscious control than over the growth of my fingernails. A prolific author, Price’s career was nearly cut short because of a battle with spinal cancer from 1984 to 1986. The radiation treatments left him paralyzed from the waist down, and he was unable to focus on reading or writing. As he explained in the interview, he was “deeply stunned and then intent in every cell on healing and lasting.” But he quickly regained focus and, in 1986, finished Kate Vaiden, one of his most beloved novels (and for which he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award). Even in the most trying times, Price believed in his work: “Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world.”
December 21, 2010 In Memoriam David Randolph By Oliver Sacks As Christmas approaches, the churches and concert halls of New York are filled with various renderings of Handel’s Messiah. But one Messiah, perhaps the most iconic of all, which filled the air last year and each year for the forty-five years before it, has gone. David Randolph conducted his St. Cecilia Chorus’s version of the Messiah at Carnegie Hall every year since 1965. His own birthday was Christmas Eve, and last December 24, as he celebrated his ninety-fifth, he was as full of physical and creative energy as ever. He would bound to the podium with the spring of someone a quarter his age, take a bow, and then turn to the audience, speaking in his deep, melodious baritone, to introduce the singers, players, and their instruments, and the main themes of the Messiah. His passion for the every aspect of the music was evident. He often gave historical glosses on a particular instrument or musical theme, and he never omitted to say that Handel drew much of his most beloved “religious” music from the bawdy Italian love songs of his time. There was no such thing as “religious” music, Randolph felt, any more than there was “military” music or “love” music; there was only music put to different uses, in different contexts. This was a point which he brought out with great eloquence in his beautiful book, This Is Music: A Guide to the Pleasure of Listening, and he would often mention it before a performance of his annual Christmas Oratorio or the great Passions he conducted at Easter. He would mention it, too, when conducting his favorite Requiem Masses by Brahms, Verdi, or Berlioz—all of whom, he would remind the audience, were atheists (as he himself was). The religious imagination, he felt, was a most precious part of the human spirit, but he was convinced that it did not require particular religious beliefs, or indeed any religious belief. (Jonathan Miller, in directing his wonderful Matthew Passion at BAM, often makes the same point.) Read More
October 12, 2010 In Memoriam Carla Cohen (1936–2010) By Lorin Stein Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in their bookstore Politics and Prose. Photograph by Chris Leaman. Carla Cohen died yesterday. For twenty-six years she and her partner, Barbara Meade, ran what was and is the best bookstore in Washington, DC: Politics and Prose. They did it by being tireless and intrepid. They opened a café when that wasn’t an obvious thing for a serious bookstore to do. The café remains a success. (They also opened a used bookstore, which wasn’t.) They were pioneers of social media avant la lettre (my parents still forward me their newsletters), and they earned the highest respect of publishers—because their customers trusted them and loved them. At the annual booksellers’ convention, Carla was royalty; it was a mark of favor for a young editor to be taken to meet her. Of course, if the young editor had grown up in northwest DC, he already had met her. There was a limit to how bookish you could be there and not know Carla; that limit was not high. Carla and Babara turned a profit at a time when most independents folded. They hired and trained an expert staff. They read everything. Most of all, they promoted excellent books. Whoever buys the store—which Barbara and Carla put up for sale this summer—will be buying an outsize piece of Washington’s mental life. No doubt Barbara will choose the best possible successor, yet neither she nor Carla can be replaced.
September 9, 2010 In Memoriam Thomas Guinzburg (1926-2010) By David Wallace-Wells It is with great sadness that The Paris Review has learned of the death of one of its founding editors, Thomas Guinzburg. A Marine veteran awarded the Purple Heart for his service in World War Two, and a former editor of the Yale Daily News, Guinzburg was just two years out of college when he became the Review’s first managing editor. He was also, nominally, a part-owner, having matched George Plimpton’s and Peter Matthiessen’s initial “investment” in the venture with a contribution of $500. He eventually became president of The Paris Review board of directors. He was planning the magazine’s fiftieth anniversary celebration with George Plimpton the night the editor died in 2003. Guinzburg was invaluable in helping direct The Paris Review in the years that followed. For many years the president of Viking Press, a publishing house established by his father, he later became chairman of the American Book Awards. He also served as consultant to Doubleday & Co. and as governor to Yale University Press. He will be missed by his many friends and admirers and remembered as one of the most distinguished publishers of our time. Read More