An exciting new anthology from the journal
Time magazine called “the biggest ‘little magazine in history.” To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the venerable
Paris Review, Picador is proud to publish a unique anthology based on the themes of modern life. Like the work of the writers included, this book will inspire a dizzying range of thought and emotion, serving as a cumulative and breathtaking “mirror” to the world we live in.
To appear:
Jack Kerouac
Norman Mailer
Louise Erdrich
Jonathan Franzen
Gabriel García Márquez
William Burroughs
Denis Johnson
David Foster Wallace
Raymond Carver
Italo Calvino
Grace Paley
and many more.
The Paris Review has published fiction, poetry, interviews, essays, and art since 1953. They have published the work of William Styron and Truman Capote, Philip Roth and Seamus Heaney, Toni Morrison and Alice Munro, among others, and have interviewed everyone from Vladimir Nabokov to Ralph Ellison to Richard Ford.
For fifty years, The Paris Review has published writing and interviews from the world's most brilliant authors. Here to commemorate its golden anniversary is a breathtaking diverse and illuminating anthology, with the greatest writers of the last half-century writing on the greatest subjects. It is a unique collection of stories, poetry, thoughts, and observations on the themes of modern life both great and trivial, as well as a compendium of timeless insights into how and why we embark on the processes of creativity and critical thinking.
Like the masterful work of the writers included, the book inspires a dizzying range of thought and emotion, holding a mirror to the world we live in and to the reader's own hopes, dreams, fears, and joy.
"This astoundingly diverse anthology, celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Paris Review, is jam-packed with resonant and provocative work from some of our greatest writers, past and present: W.H. Auden, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Elizabeth Bishop, Truman Capote, William Burroughs, Susan Sontag, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan and Alice Munro, to name just a fraction. Rather than relying on critics to illuminate the craft of writing secondhand, the founders inaugurated a series of interviews with the authors themselves, creating what Plimpton, in his introduction, refers to as 'a DNA of literature'; several excerpts from those interviews are included here. A look at the eras and themes represented shows that the journal's only abiding mandate has been an evolving brand of artistic humanism, which has morphed and adapted to the changing times. How else can one explain being able to jump with such joy and ease from a hilarious and poignant story by Lorrie Moore to an interview with Ted Hughes about his first meeting with Sylvia Plath, then to Allen Ginsberg's loving, sexually charged poem about the life and death of Frank O'Hara? It is a tribute to Plimpton and his cofounders that the entries in this wonderful book can be read in any order, for the reader will be able to see his or her life reflected on every page."Publishers Weekly
"This astoundingly diverse anthology, celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Paris Review, is jam-packed with resonant and provocative work from some of our greatest writers, past and present: W.H. Auden, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Elizabeth Bishop, Truman Capote, William Burroughs, Susan Sontag, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan and Alice Munro, to name just a fraction. Rather than relying on critics to illuminate the craft of writing secondhand, the founders inaugurated a series of interviews with the authors themselves, creating what Plimpton, in his introduction, refers to as 'a DNA of literature'; several excerpts from those interviews are included here. A look at the eras and themes represented shows that the journal's only abiding mandate has been an evolving brand of artistic humanism, which has morphed and adapted to the changing times. How else can one explain being able to jump with such joy and ease from a hilarious and poignant story by Lorrie Moore to an interview with Ted Hughes about his first meeting with Sylvia Plath, then to Allen Ginsberg's loving, sexually charged poem about the life and death of Frank O'Hara? It is a tribute to Plimpton and his cofounders that the entries in this wonderful book can be read in any order, for the reader will be able to see his or her life reflected on every page."Publishers Weekly
"This is a truly unique collection from an inspiring 'small' review that has greatly influenced the community of writers that it serves; recommended for all literature collections." Rachel Collins, Library Journal
"Invigorating anthology of work from the noted literary journal... Like the Paris Review itself: a high-toned, occasionally old-fashioned, indisputable repository of accomplished writing." Kirkus Reviews
George Plimpton, Introduction
William Styron, Letter to an Editor
Heartbreak
Lorrie Moore, Terrific Mother
Jonathan Galassi, Elms
Bernard Cooper, The Fine Art of Sighing
Heather McHugh, Intensive Care
Raymond Carver, Careful
Joseph Brodsky, To Urania
Madness
Zelda Fitzgerald, Zelda: A Worksheet
Malcolm Lowry, Lunar Caustic
Barbara Hamby, Delirium
Susan Mitchell, Autobiography
Bobbie Ann Mason, Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?
Robert Stone, The Ascent of Mount Carmel
Sex
Donald Barthelme, Alice
S.X. Rosenstock, Rimininny!
John Updike, Two Cunts in Paris
William T. Vollmann, The Art of Fiction CLXIII
Louis Begley, The Art of Fiction CLXXII
Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction XL
Richard Howard, With a Potpourri Down Under
Anthony Hecht, Le Jet d'Eau
Rick Moody, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven
Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction CXXXIV
Margaret Atwood, The Art of Fiction CXXI
Mordecai Richler, A Liberal Education
Love
David Foster Wallace, Little Expressionless Animals
Rosanna Warren, Cyprian
Ted Hughes, The Art of Poetry LXXI
Jeanette Winterson, The Art of Fiction CL
Edmund White, The Art of Fiction CV
Kenneth Koch, To the French Language
Charlie Smith, Los Dos Rancheros
Michael Cunningham, Pearls
A.R. Ammons, Everything
Betrayal
Lucille Clifton, Lorena
Marilyn Hacker, Migraine Sonnets
Jonathan Franzen, Chez Lambert
Joanna Scott, You Must Relax!
Beth Gylys, Marriage Song
Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
Outsiders
Jonathan Lethem, Tugboat Syndrome
Truman Capote, The Art of Fiction XVII
Charles Simic,Against Winter
Adrienne Rich, Thirty-three
Jorge Luis Borges, Funes the Memorious
Alice Munro, Spaceships Have Landed
Intoxication
Jay McInerney, It's Six a.m., Do You Know and Where You Are?
Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson
Stanley Elkin, The Guest
William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction XII
John Irving, The Art of Fiction XCIII
Hunter S. Thompson, The Art of Journalism I
William Burroughs, The Art of Fiction XXXVI
Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries
Denis Johnson, Car-Crash While Hitchhiking
War
Italo Calvino, Last Comes the Raven
Paul West, Blind White Fish in Belgium
Primo Levi, The Art of Fiction CXL
Ezra Pound, The Art of Poetry V
Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction LXIV
Peter Ho Davies, The Ends
Frank O'Hara, Pearl Harbor
W.S. Merwin, Conquerer
Harold Pinter, The Art of Theater III
Ha Jin, The Dead Soldier's Talk
John Le Carré, The Art of Fiction CXLIX
Susan Sontag, The Art of Fiction CXLIII
Nicholas Christopher, Terminus
Geoffrey Hill, A Prayer to the Sun
Whimsy
Umberto Eco, How to Travel with a Salmon
20Edward Gorey, The Admonitory Hippopotamus: or, Angelica and Sneezby
Eugene WalterMilking the Moon
Various, Pomework: An Exercise in Occasional Poetry
James Merrill and David Jackson, The Plato Club
Horrors
Grace Paley, The Little Girl
Galway Kinnell, Lackawanna
Ian McEwan, The Art of Fiction CLXXIII
Joyce Carol Oates, Heat
Rachel Wetzsteon, Home and Away
Charles Tomlinson, The Broom: The New Wife's Tale
Vijay Seshadri, Ailanthus
Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things
God
Philip Roth, The Conversion of the Jews
Pattiann Rogers, The Fallacy of Thinking Flesh Is Flesh
Larry Brown, A Roadside Resurrection
Robert Bly, The Breath
Gabriel García Márquez, The Saint
Yusef Komunyakaa, Memory Cave
Susan Power, Snakes
Death
Allen Ginsberg, City Midnight Junk Strains
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning
Seamus Heaney, The Art of Poetry LXXV
A.S. Byatt, The Art of Fiction CLXVII
Priscilla Becker, Letter After an Estrangement
Maile Meloy, Aqua Boulevard
Robert Pinsky, The Saving
Thom Gunn, Sacred Heart
John Montague, Return
Norman Mailer, A Work in Progress
Dinner
Daniel S. Libman, In the Belly of the Cat
Gary Snyder, Oysters
Anthony Burgess, The Art of Fiction XLVIII
Marie Ponsot, Non-Vegetarian
Jim Crace, The Devil's Larder
Baseball
Jim Shepard, Batting Against Castro
Anne Waldman, Curt Flood
Donald Hall, The Third Inning
T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Hector Quesadilla Story
Travels
Jack Kerouac, The Mexican Girl
Robyn Selman, Exodus
Joel Brouwer, Rostropovich at Checkpoint Charlie, November 11, 1989
Anne Carson, TV Men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2)
Agha Shahid Ali, A History of Paisley
Barry Lopez, The Interior of North Dakota
James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction LXXVIII
Philip Larkin, The Art of Poetry XXX
V.S. Naipaul, The Art of Fiction CLIV
Charles D'Ambrosio, Her Real Name
The Art of Writing
John Ashbery, Musica Reservata
J.D. McClatchy, At a Reading
John Hollander, Making It
Elizabeth Bishop and May Swenson, Correspondence
John Cheever, On the Literary Life
Ian McEwan, The Art of Fiction CLXXIII
Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction LXIX
Mario Vargas Llosa, The Art of Fiction CXX
Tennessee Williams, The Art of Theater V
Gertrude Stein, A Radio Interview
Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry XLII
E.L. Doctorow, The Art of Fiction XCIV
Joseph Heller, The Art of Fiction LI
Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction CXXX
Chinua Achebe, The Art of Fiction CXXXIX
Paul Bowles, The Art of Fiction LXVII
John Updike, The Art of Fiction XLIII
John Mortimer, The Art of Fiction CVI
Robert Creeley, The Art of Poetry X
Thornton Wilder, The Art of Fiction XVI
Wendy Wasserstein, The Art of Theater XII
Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction XXI
James Salter, The Art of Fiction CXXXIII
Don Delillo, The Art of Fiction CXXXV
Henry Miller, The Art of Fiction XXVIII
William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction XII
Elizabeth Hardwick, The Art of Fiction LXXXVII
The Contributors
Acknowledgments