June 22, 2010 A Letter from the Editor New Poetry Editor By Lorin Stein We are delighted to announce that Robyn Creswell will join our masthead this fall as poetry editor. A critic, translator, and scholar, Robyn has written about contemporary poetry and fiction for Harper‘s magazine, The Nation, Raritan, n+1, and other magazines. His translation of Abdelfattah Kilito’s novel The Clash of Images will appear this fall from New Directions. “I’m thrilled to join The Paris Review as poetry editor,” Robyn writes. “The Review is one of the most vital organs of American literary culture, and its poetry section has always been a place where emerging as well as established poets have their say. It’s exciting to become part of a magazine that has published the whole spectrum of brilliance from John Ashbery to Amy Clampitt, from Charles Olson to Anne Carson. The Review also has an impressive history of publishing translations of the best poets from abroad, and I look forward to continuing that tradition.” Meghan O’Rourke and Dan Chiasson—who have done wonders as co-editors of our poetry section—will remain with the Review as advisory editors. In their words: “After a five-year tenure as poetry editors, it seemed an opportune time to turn back to our own work while continuing an informal and broad-ranging relationship with the new Review. Becoming advisory editors allows us to do that. Of course, one of the things we hope to give some advice on, when it’s wanted, is poetry.” In the short term, stay tuned to The Paris Review Daily for an exchange between Meghan and Dan about Matthew Zapruder’s astonishing long poem “Come On All You Ghosts.” In the long term, our editors hope to bring you not just the best poems, but also lively commentary on those poems, and to help them find the readership they deserve.
June 22, 2010 At Work Why David Means Is Not a Novelist By David Wallace-Wells Photograph by Max MeansSince his 1991 debut “A Quick Kiss of Redemption,” David Means has established himself among the finest and most incisive American writers of contemporary short fiction—and as the member of his generation perhaps most invested in the short form itself. In his three previous books—each curated with remarkable care and enviable devotion—Means has delivered exquisite local portraits of the destitute, desolate, and disconsolate in postindustrial America. In the course of discussing “The Spot,” his marvelous new collection of razor-sharp shorts, we wondered, is he tempted at all to go longer—to essay the novel? Yeah, I’m tempted by the novel. Tempted is the correct word because compared to the demands of the story it would seem that the novel, all that wide-open space, would be enticing after four story collections. But what’s not enticing to me is the idea of simply going big and wide for the sake of giving into the possibility of going big. I love novels, and I read them more than anything, but stories cut in sharp and hard and are able to reveal things in a different way: they’re highly charged, a slightly newer form, and inherently more contemporary. Big and wide can mean expansive and comprehensive, but it can also mean bloat. Novels often thin themselves out to a watery hue—some even start that way—and at times seem to only ride along the surface of things, giving us what we already know, reporting the news that is just news. Ezra Pound said that literature is news that stays news. I keep reading novels that feel, even if they’re trying new tricks, like old news, and often resort to cliché to keep moving: out of the corner of his eyes, his heart was pounding in his chest, that kind of thing. Those books are just surfing along on a very small waves—reading them is like watching surfers on Cape Cod trying to catch whatever’s coming in on a lame day. Read More
June 22, 2010 Arts & Culture “Most Brilliant, Most Highbrow”: New York Magazine By Thessaly La Force Boy, were we thrilled to discover that the Katherine Dunn story from our summer issue has appeared in the top right corner of New York Magazine‘s Approval Matrix! You can buy the issue at your local independent bookstore or on our site. And you can also read a Q&A on the Daily with Dunn and Caitlin Roper, the issue’s editor.
June 22, 2010 Terry Southern Month My Lunch With Terry Southern By Gerald Howard Photograph by Pud GadiotAs most editors eventually learn to their chagrin, encounters with one’s literary heroes usually end up as disappointing and deflating experiences. But in the early eighties, I had a lunch with the great Terry Southern that was sheer perfection on every level. As a sixties adolescent of the standard issue sort I had my psyche and to some extent my erotic imagination comandeered by Southern. There was Candy, of course, one of the great dirty books (or “dbs,” as Terry called them) of our time. Oh, how my idiot friends and I enjoyed repeating lines like “Give me your hump!” and “When I was in Italy, I got so much hot Italian cock that I stopped menstruating and started minestroneing.” into the ambient Brooklyn air at an inappropriately loud volume. But even better, to me, was The Magic Christian, wherein the multimillionaire prankster Guy Grand oh so grandly and ingeniously sends up the stupid adult world in ways I could only dream about. I must have read it in its Bantam paperback edition a dozen times. And mirabile dictu, when I became an editor at Penguin in the early eighties, I discovered that both of these books were out of print (wtf?) and was able to repay Terry Southern the favor by arranging to reissue them in trade paperback. Read More
June 21, 2010 Arts & Culture The Poor Man’s Paris Review By Lorin Stein This morning we received a copy of The Paris Magazine, which bills itself as “The Poor Man’s Paris Review” and has appeared exactly four times since its founding in 1967. This isn’t very often for a quarterly magazine. Like a blazing comet with an extremely irregular orbit, issue four of The Paris Magazine is not to be missed. I commend to your attention—just for example—Todd McEwen on growing up Thoreauvian: “It was Thoreau’s slow, almost maddeningly slow, description of leaves, of trees, that drew me in. Right away I recognized in Thoreau a fellow connoisseur of depression … ” (This called to mind a favorite paragraph from Sam Munson’s recent novel The November Criminals.) Instead of answering several important e-mails, I also read Rivka Galchen’s essay on the DSM, Ferlinghetti’s game attempt to translate “Le Pont Mirabeau,” and a rangy essay by Michel Houellebecq on contemporary architecture, including these memorable last lines: A society which has attained an overheated level doesn’t necessarily melt, but it is unable to produce meaning, since all its energy is taken up with the description of its random variations. Every individual is however capable of producing a sort of cold revolution within himself by stepping outside the infomercial flow. It’s very easy to do. It has in fact never been simpler than today to adopt an aesthetic position in relation to the world: all you have to do is take a step to the side. And this step in the final instance is itself useless. It is enough to pause; to switch off the radio, unplug the television; not to buy anything else, not to want to buy anything else. It is enough to no longer take part, to no longer know; to temporarily suspend all mental activity. It is enough, literally, to be still for a few seconds. Which is exactly what I was! Congratulations to the new editor of The Paris Magazine, Fatema Ahmed, and to its publisher, the much-loved Shakespeare and Company. May they too find some momentary stillness—and yet manage to produce their next issue before 2019.
June 21, 2010 Department of Sex Ed Es Muss Sein By Clothilde Lu I would never have had my very first orgasm, missionary style, on a twin-size futon in the middle of a school day had he not given me the book. It was The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In the inscription, he wrote he didn’t want his first gift to me to be something as fleeting as flowers or chocolate. They die, they get eaten, they disappear. How could I not be impressed? I was a teenager, a California girl from the quintessential southern part, where I’d probably been too preoccupied with all that, like, sun to get entangled in post-exile, Czech-communist literature. Days later, I gave him my virginity. It was his first time too. We did it the way humans are meant to, without rubbers or other prophylactic nuisances. Afterward, he put on my bathrobe and sat out on my balcony, holding a wine-glass of orange juice in one hand, a cigarette in the other. I took a snapshot. We laughed. I won’t lie and say I burned my way through it. In fact, I could barely get past the first sentence: The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! Goddamn, it was a doozy of a line—a harbinger of many more that I also didn’t quite get. Several pages in, I’d suddenly come out of a haze and realize I’d just lost the last ten minutes of my life. It was like leaving Los Angeles on the 405 late at night, lulled by miles of darkness and speed, and then remembering: I’m still driving. Read More