April 1, 2013 The Revel Paula Fox, in Plain Sight By Tom Bissell This year our Spring Revel will take place on April 9. In anticipation of the event, the Daily is featuring a series of essays celebrating Paula Fox, who is being honored this year with The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize. In 1998, which now feels like a Triassically distant time, I was twenty-four years old and on the publishing make. Technically, I was an editorial assistant, but I was making bold, audacious, and sometimes highly presumptuous assistant editor moves. I had some call, mind you. W. W. Norton, the house that employed me, had encouraged me to come up with “ideas” for the paperback committee, which at the time felt like a huge honor. Correction: it was a huge honor. I had a few ideas, most of which, I was gently informed, stank. But one didn’t. This was the idea I had of republishing a thirty-year-old novel about a cat bite (and urban collapse, race relations, gentrification, and New York City) called Desperate Characters. Read More
April 1, 2013 On the Shelf This Is Your Life on Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein The book lover’s dilemma, via Rena Maguire. Merriam-Webster’s is movin’ with the times, incorporating such newfangled phrases as the hideous bucket list, 2010-ish game changer, mysterious robocall, belated mashup, usefulcrowdsourcing, unfortunate cyberbullying, and inevitable viral. If Marx lived today, speculates one biographer, “he would be a compulsive blogger, and picking Twitter fights with Andrew Sullivan and Naomi Klein.” Speaking of! Celebrate Easter (belatedly) by testing your knowledge of resurrections in literature. Genius in literature: a handy-dandy chart.
March 29, 2013 The Print Series Christo, Untitled, 1982 By The Paris Review Since 1964 The Paris Review has commissioned a series of prints and posters by major contemporary artists. Contributing artists have included Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Bourgeois, Ed Ruscha, and William Bailey. Each print is published in an edition of sixty to two hundred, most of them signed and numbered by the artist. All have been made especially and exclusively for The Paris Review. Many are still available for purchase. Proceeds go to The Paris Review Foundation, established in 2000 to support The Paris Review.
March 29, 2013 Humor The Private Lives of Web Journalists By Jason Novak Jason Novak works at a grocery store in Berkeley, California, and changes diapers in his spare time.
March 29, 2013 Look Paris Was Yesterday By Sadie Stein This gallery of images of Paris, then and now, is completely mesmerizing. As they say, it is indeed a time machine.
March 29, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Dancing Horses, Critical Fashion By The Paris Review For reasons I don’t begin to understand, Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith used to be required reading in American high schools. My own copy (1905) is a schoolbook edition, complete with suggestions for extra credit (“The teacher should know Thackeray’s English Humorists, D’Arblay’s Diary and Letters, Dobson’s Eighteenth Century Vignettes,” and four other books you’ve never heard of). It is hard to believe that such a fascinating biography was ever taught to kids. What did they care about the economics of Grub Street, or the incredible elegance with which writers once knew how to break a contract? Irving and Goldsmith both did plenty of hack work—a term Irving uses without prejudice—but this is clearly a labor of love and obsession. And it’s that rare thing in literary history: a penetrating essay by a great humorist, whose work is still just within our reach, about another who stands outside the pale. —Lorin Stein For many of us, fashion is a tricky thing: while both the way people choose to dress themselves and the art form are fascinating, the intersection can be, to say the least, problematic. Enter Fashion Projects, a journal devoted to critical discourse in fashion. If that sounds oxymoronic, try issue 4, out now: an interview with Judith Thurman, Jay Ruttenberg on Bill Cunningham, and fashion criticism as political critique are just a few things it takes on. —Sadie Stein Read More