• Home
  • About
    • CultureCrash: The Blog
    • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Scott Timberg
    • Contact
  • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Book Events
  • Other AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

CultureCrash

Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

New Editor at Paris Review

March 8, 2010 by Scott Timberg

I’ve been hearing about the legendary Lorin Stein — a hip young editor at Farrar Straus and Giroux, probably the coolest of the major houses — for years now. So I wasn’t alone in cheering when he was appointed the new editor of the storied Paris Review.

Stein — who has edited novels by Denis Johnson, the press’s translations of Bolano’s Savage Detectives and 2666, and three of the five National Book Award finalists from 2008 and, more recently, Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask and Elif Batuman’s The Possessed — takes over the job held for decades by George Plimpton and most recently by Philip Gourevitch.
(I recall meeting Plimpton at the LATimes Festival of Books a few years ago — it was the most starstruck I have ever seen my then-girlfriend/now-wife.)
I’ve corresponded with Stein a few times and been struck by both his serious commitment to literature — he is a burning advocate of the twisted poet Frederick Seidel — and his highly developed Gen X irony. (Will the next Paris Review offer long interviews with Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus, Lois and poet David Berman? The Misread City would not object.)
I spoke to Stein in ’07 for THIS story in response to Granta’s ’07Best Young Author’s issue, which included many foreign born authors. (The piece also includes interviews with then-Granta editor Ian Jack and critic Laura Miller.)

He talked about the days, as recently as the mid-’90s, when a literary review’s author list could still enrage people:

“I’m not going to be able to walk into a party, or a bar, and get into that fight now,” he said. “Because that discussion is over. The readership has fractured, and reads less, and spends more time e-mailing. And it makes less sense to talk about novelists now — the really creative writing is being done in other genres” such as the personal essay, reportage and criticism.

“The novel has become like landscape painting,” he said. “It’s the ‘top’ genre, but not, in real life, the main one.”

Here’s looking forward to where Lorin Stein takes the Paris Review.

Filed Under: 90s, bolano, books, gen x, george plimpton, granta, Laura Miller, Lorin Stein, Paris Review, poetry

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

Follow Me

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

Archives

@TheMisreadCity

Tweets by @TheMisreadCity
March 2010
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  
« Feb   Apr »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Scott Timberg Has Passed Away
  • Ojai Music Festival and JACK Quartet
  • What’s in a Name?
  • Time Pauses For Valentin Silvestrov
  • The Perverse Imagination of Edward Carey

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in