The Paris Review Anthology - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393027694 ISBN 13: 9780393027693

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990

Synopsis

Venerable at 35 and justly venerated for its unequalled mix of fiction, poetry, interview and essay, the Paris Review remains the single most important little magazine this country has produced. A glimpse through the table of contents of this new compendium will demonstrate why; the editors have launched a thousand careers and consistently published the best work of some of the best writers of our time. ―T. Coraghessan Boyle

A selection of representative fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from the Anthology from 1953 to present.

About this title

About the Author

George Plimpton was an American journalist, actor, editor, and writer. Well-known for helping to found The Paris Review and for his sports writing, Plimpton died from natural causes in 2003.

Reviews

A cornucopia of fiction, poetry and prose from 35 years of the prestigious Paris Review , this rich collection comprises 187 items, many by award-winning authors, constituting a stunning array of literary strategies. Some of the stories by such authors as Evan Connell, Philip Roth and James Salter have attained the status of classics. Among the finest recent works, Rick Bass's "Wild Horses" entwines human sorrow with the suffering of animals; people who inhabit others' lives appear in Raymond Carver's "Why Don't You Dance" and Joy Williams's "Making Friends." Skewed, offbeat humor and incendiary wit surfaces in tales by Steven Dixon, Thomas M. Disch and T. Coraghessan Boyle. Reminiscences/interviews feature excerpts from the famed Writers-at-Work series ("Portraits" of, e.g., Yeats, Eliot, Faulkner and Frost); a profile of Lady Diana Cooper, author and friend of literary figures, by Shasha Guppy; and Bobby Anderson's riveting memoir of drug-addicted Edie Sedgwick, a doomed beauty in Andy Warhol's coterie. The diction of the poetry ranges from the tautly formalist to the magically charged, from the resilient accents of stylized speech to the intimately confessional. Arranged in five sections covering seven years each, the anthology conveys the sense that language is potent and redemptive; introductory notes are full of nuggets of literary and publishing history, and reflect the views of a succession of editors.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This anthology has historical as well as literary significance since it reminds readers how a new era in writing began. The Paris Review was founded in 1953 as a counterblast to what has been called the Age of Criticism; thus, almost all the 187 pieces in this collection are fiction and poetry, with essays about authors replaced by interviews with them. Editor Plimpton was in college during the Review 's early days, and while the magazine has retained its youthful intellectual curiosity over the years, it has kept something of youth's high-spirited silliness as well; the ultimate Paris Review story will always be Dallas Wiebe's "Night Flight to Stockholm" (included here), in which a writer literally gives his little finger to get published.
- David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393027694
• ISBN 13: 9780393027693
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 688
• Editor: Plimpton George