June 7, 2012 At Work Adaptation: An Interview with Ramona Ausubel By Samantha Hunt My conversation with Ramona Ausubel took place in the ether between upstate New York and California, from a small desk in my bedroom to her home in Santa Barbara. I wore something slobbishly inappropriate and kept one eye on my three kids as I typed. A tired Ausubel was herself caring for her newborn infant. So I cannot tell you about her curly red hair, her slippers, or the tone of her voice. I cannot tell whether you can smell the Pacific from her house. You will have to imagine these details, an appropriate exercise for thinking about an author whose debut novel is so wholly original it climbs new heights of imaginary prowess. While the world might be sick with our busy-making and e-mail interviews, Ramona Ausubel’s debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, offers an antidote. Impossibly she has set her story in both a fabled land where magic is plentiful and in the brutish depths of World War II. Though the novel is concerned with identity and community, there is nothing quaint in Ausubel’s confluence of the domestic and the historic. History seeps through cracks in stories and prayers the characters tell as they reimagine the borders and rulebooks of a small town. The patterns of home replicate into the patterns of the planet, but a reader finds nothing small in these small acts. —Samantha Hunt Read More
June 7, 2012 On the Shelf Bradbury, Trethewey, and an Android By The Paris Review “I am not afraid of robots. I am afraid of people.” Ray Bradbury answers a fan letter, 1974. Natasha Trethewey is named Poet Laureate. Telling tales on the mid-century New Yorker. Just who was Janet Groth’s thinly disguised cad, the Great Deceiver? Protesting New York City library cuts. An Emily Dickinson garden party in Amherst. Controversial words in China and the USA. The android head of Philip K. Dick is terrifying.
June 6, 2012 On Television Dear Lane Pryce, Some Retroactive Advice By Adam Wilson Dear Lane Pryce, I feel like Eminem when he wrote to that dude Stan, recommending psychiatric treatment before realizing that Stan had already driven his car off a bridge, pregnant girlfriend tied up in the trunk. Or like the guy in that Phil Collins song “In the Air Tonight” who could have saved that other guy from drowning, but didn’t. Or like Count Vronsky in Anna Karenina, who was so busy partying with socialites, he didn’t realize his girlfriend was depressed and fucked up on morphine until it was too late. [Spoiler alert! -Ed.] Read More
June 6, 2012 First Person Fact-checking Ray Bradbury By Stephen Hiltner I didn’t grow up reading The Paris Review. My earliest encounter with the magazine—I’m somewhat ashamed to admit—came in graduate school, when I stumbled upon an interview with Milan Kundera. (I was writing a paper on translation, and the quote I pulled didn’t even make it into a footnote.) Had you asked me, a year or so later, when I found myself applying for an internship, what the magazine meant to me, I wouldn’t have given you an honest answer. It didn’t mean much of anything to me. I wanted a foot in the door in New York, and The Paris Review’s seemed as good a door as any. The latest issue, 191, had closed just before I started, so my first few weeks were quiet. I read submissions, delivered packages, distributed the mail. Then came my first real assignment: We were running an interview with Ray Bradbury, and it needed fact-checking. I volunteered. Read More
June 6, 2012 Bulletin Special Summer Subscription Offer! By The Paris Review You’ve read about our Summer issue. But wait, there’s more: subscribe now and for a mere $30, get a full year of The Paris Review. That’s right, this week you can get four issues of fiction, poetry, essays, and all the rest for only $30, which is, yes, $7.50 an issue, and, yes, a real bargain. And $10 off Canadian and international subscriptions, too! Offer good through Friday, June 15. Subscribe now!
June 6, 2012 In Memoriam Ray Bradbury, 1920–2012 By The Paris Review “I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t know—you haven’t done it yet. You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful. And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference? Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.” —Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203