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
September 7, 2010 In Memoriam Frank Kermode (1919-2010) By Elisabeth Sifton The writer and critic Frank Kermode, who died last month at the age of 91, was, for the many colleagues and readers who loved and admired him in America and England, sui generis. Over more than sixty years, in more than fifty books and hundreds—no, thousands—of vigorous, elegant review articles, not to mention his classes and lectures, we came to know his never-failing equipoise; his stupendous literary, scholastic and philosophical learning; and a precision and lightness of touch that gave even his most difficult work an aura of grace. What was he up to? He was much more than a professor of literature, as his label described him, however high-minded and admirable that profession may be. For one thing, he disregarded the usual boundaries, teaching and writing about literature from the Renaissance to the present day—dramas, novels, histories, letters, scriptures, poetry. He analyzed the way criticism of various genres evolved, how readers and writers treated novelty or adhered to tradition; he instructed us on the many strategies developed for trying to understand what writers of this poem or that narrative meant to say—wie es eigentlich gemeint, to paraphrase the great Ranke. And he gave us unforced judgments on the greatest literary works ancient and modern, whose breathtaking splendors, which he clearly loved, he taught us to comprehend. Where did this amazing person come from? Who was he? In a fine memoir composed in his seventies, Not Entitled, Kermode wrote about his childhood in Douglas, the capital of the Isle of Man, where his father was a grocery clerk and his mother a café waitress. It’s all there in his early years, of course, or a lot of it—the mother with no parents, no family, no past, but with a rich sense of language, both Manx and English, along with a practiced, lively social style that was deferential to strangers yet easy with them, to whom Frank owed, as he put it, not only his “early training in politeness and motiveless civility” but also the “association of gaiety with terror, giggling with desolation”; the father, well-liked, very hardworking, strong, hot-tempered yet anxious, whose characteristic “patient good humour” was eventually destroyed by “disappointment, hard labour and diabetes.” And then there was their oblique, many-layered awareness of England as a foreign governing power, and their attachment to the Anglican Church, which conveniently signaled that the Kermodes were not, in the Manx world, either low-born “dissenters” or, worse, Irish Catholic. These were parents who didn’t quite know what to do with their mysteriously gifted though clumsy and short-sighted son, except to complain about him (his father) or push him to try harder (his mother). If nothing else, they taught Frank “what it meant to work, however unseasonably, however against the grain.” Read More
June 28, 2010 In Memoriam Ben Sonnenberg (1936-2010) By Lorin Stein The Paris Review salutes Ben Sonnenberg, the founding editor of Grand Street, who died last Thursday at the age of seventy-three. He was a hero to many of us. Although Grand Street may never have had more than a few thousand subscribers, it was one of the great literary magazines of our time. Recently the artist Matteo Pericoli drew the view from Sonnenberg’s window and asked Sonnenberg to describe what he saw there every day. The view and text are excerpted from Pericoli’s book The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York: It’s a southwest-facing window and that means plenty of sunlight, a rarity in this city. The lower part of the view shows the roof tops of the small nineteenth-century houses that line West Seventy-sixth and Seventy-seventh Streets, a view pretty much unchanged since the time our building went up in 1927, and that is very pleasant. In the near distance is an apartment building contemporary with ours which has the merit of featuring an old-fashioned wooden water tower. Fortunately for my wife and me, the modern buildings of Donald Trump, with their ugly fenestration and hostile immensity, figure only in the distance. The glory of our view is the lordly, moody Hudson River, much reduced here in the middle-right. For the twenty-seven years of our marriage this has afforded us sunsets that on some days are spectacular, on others merely beautiful.
June 18, 2010 In Memoriam José Saramago (1922–2010) By The Paris Review Click here to read the Art of Fiction interview with José Saramago from the Winter 1998 issue.
June 1, 2010 In Memoriam Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) By David Wallace-Wells When Louise Bourgeois published “The View From the Bottom of the Well,” a seminarrative portfolio of prints, in The Paris Review (Fall 1996), she seemed already to be gazing up from the grave. Bourgeois, who died yesterday at ninety-eight, had been long enjoying a kind of afterlife as a celebrity sculptor, with work that made improbably explicit the themes that had animated her work from the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties—the human body and its vulnerability, the threat of predation, sexuality both grotesque and ever-present. That afterlife owed quite a lot to a 1982 photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, which showed a grandmotherly Bourgeois fondling her phallic sculpture Fillette. And when she began in her seventies and eighties to receive major commissions and museum retrospectives, the acclaim seemed as much personal as aesthetic, the exhibitions inspired as much by her engaging biography and confessional personality as by the work itself, which could hardly be reduced to the story of childhood trauma. Longtime followers knew that Bourgeois was much more than Spiderwoman, and in the summer of 1984, at perhaps the peak of her fame, the Review published a small portfolio of her drawings from the fifties—as a kind of reminder, it seems, that though her work was often engrossingly personal it was also, at its best, arcane. Below, a slide show of her two portfolios from The Paris Review: Pause Play Play Prev | Next