{"id":998,"date":"2010-03-08T11:01:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-08T19:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2010\/03\/new-editor-at-paris-review.html"},"modified":"2010-03-08T11:01:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-08T19:01:00","slug":"new-editor-at-paris-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2010\/03\/new-editor-at-paris-review.html","title":{"rendered":"New Editor at Paris Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
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.\u00a0So I wasn’t alone in cheering when he was appointed the new editor of the storied Paris Review.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Stein — who has edited novels by Denis Johnson, the press’s translations of Bolano’s Savage Detectives<\/i>\u00a0and 2666<\/i>, and three<\/i> of the five National Book Award finalists from 2008 and, more recently, Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask<\/i> and Elif Batuman’s The Possessed — <\/i>takes over the job held for decades by George Plimpton and most recently by Philip Gourevitch.<\/div>\n
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(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.)<\/div>\n
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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.)<\/div>\n
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I spoke to Stein in ’07 for THIS<\/a> story in response to\u00a0Granta’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.)<\/p>\n

He talked about the days, as recently as the mid-’90s, when a literary review’s author list could still enrage people:<\/p><\/div>\n

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“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.<\/span><\/div>\n

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“The novel has become like landscape painting,” he said. “It’s the ‘top’ genre, but not, in real life, the main one.”<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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Here’s looking forward to where Lorin Stein takes the Paris Review.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0So 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[122,302,35,123,305,301,306,303,304,90],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-998","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-90s","7":"category-bolano","8":"category-books","9":"category-gen-x","10":"category-george-plimpton","11":"category-granta","12":"category-laura-miller","13":"category-lorin-stein","14":"category-paris-review","15":"category-poetry","16":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/998\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}