Paris Review editor Lorin Stein sat down alongside James Salter, Mona Simpson, and John Jeremiah Sullivan to discuss the magazine’s sixtieth anniversary with Charlie Rose. At one point Stein admits that, “If you wrote about sex the way Jim [Salter] writes about sex … in nonfiction, you would be a sociopath.” (Bonus: Stein writes about John O’Hara for The New Yorker.)
The Paris Review’s Roundtable
The Game is the Game
“The appropriate term for what both [David Foster] Wallace and [Roger] Federer did, however, perhaps isn’t synthesis; more apt would be the Hegelian term, aufheben, which can mean a great many things – to lift up, to abolish, to cancel, to suspend, to sublate, to preserve, to transcend – all at once, where two existing terms are abolished, sublated, transcended by way of the orchestration of a collision between them, out of which a new term emerges, which then itself goes in search of a partner with which to collide.” A really fantastic review of David Foster Wallace’s String Theory from 3:AM Magazine.
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Author as Commercial Mechanism
Has Edward St. Aubyn killed the existentialist novel? Jacob Kiernan at Full Stop Magazine has a few ideas about it. If it’s existential quandary you’re after, this essay for The Millions on the beautiful afterlife of books–which may not be so much of an afterlife, after all–will be perfect for you.
Special Feature: Kathryn Stripling Byer
The new issue of Story South dedicated its “Special Feature: Southern Poets” section to the work of Kathryn Stripling Byer. To wit, you can check out two of her poems – “Waiting for Bob” and “Making Myself at Home” – as well as an interview between her and Terry Kennedy, and a review of her latest collection, Descent.
“This ghoulish treasure trove”
At one time considered to be the work of demons or incubi, sleep paralysis – the “transition state between wakefulness and rest characterized by complete muscle atonia” – has since become accepted as a well-documented and not very uncommon phenomenon. Still, “the experience can be terrifying,” writes Karen Emslie in her recent piece about making the best of the condition.
Bad News/Good News
N+1 – we repeat – is not putting its archives online, as we surmised from a too-quick perusal of its new website. (We regret the error. Post in haste, repent at leisure.) But it might, for $75,000.
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Undine Spragg: Edith Wharton’s Best Antiheroine
In her introduction to Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country, Jia Tolentino paints Undine Spragg as an easily relatable antiheroine.
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