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Blogs -> Artists and Producers -> Nathaniel Rich, The Paris Review
As
a rule I feel that it’s the role of an editor to stay behind the scenes, avoid
making broad declarations about his work, and let the published writing speak
for itself. And this is what we do at The
Paris Review. We don’t run editorials, we shy away from making
proclamations in the press about our editorial “mission,” and we never print
readers’ mail (as a result, we don’t get much either). No more vivid and
accurate statement of our editorial ambitions has been written since the one
written by William Styron fifty-five years ago, and published in the magazine’s
inaugural issue. In his “Letter to An Editor,” Styron wrote,
“I think The Paris Review should
welcome these people into its pages—the good writers and good poets, the
non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they’re good.”
I was somewhat at a loss when asked to
write this blog entry because I do feel strongly that the “good” (though I’d
say “excellent”) stories that we’ve been proud to publish in The Paris Review under the leadership of
Philip Gourevitch—some of the best examples of which will be read at the
February 11 Symphony Space event—should speak for themselves, and should also
speak for the magazine. But I did think it might be helpful to say something
about this quality of the “good,” the assessing of which is a slippery, fraught
business.
The search for the good starts every
day with several USPS plastic bins filled with mail. We receive approximately
one thousand unsolicited short-story submissions every month,
in addition to dozens of stories and novel excerpts sent by literary agents,
publishers, book editors, and writers with whom we’re already in touch. (We get even
more poetry: a good sign for the nation’s poetic ambitions, or perhaps a bad
sign for the nation’s attention span, I’m not certain—a poem can be only a few
lines long.). Each submitted story is read by at least two members of our staff
of volunteer readers and interns; any story that receives praise from two
readers is subsequently read and evaluated in writing by the entire staff.
At
that point stories are passed around the office between the editors, and over
the course of informal and formal editorial conversations—highly civil, if
occasionally laced with vitriol and profanity—a decision is ultimately reached.
Having now participated in nearly three years of such debate, I can say with
some confidence that Styron understated the criterion for publication in the
magazine. We don’t just look for stories that are good. We do, after all, see
pretty good stories with some regularity. Many of these are of the sort that,
were you to encounter one in a story collection by an author you respected, you
might tip your hat and go on to the next. That is to say they are well-told and
honestly-written, with some glimmer-in-the-eye to them. These stories are all
well and, yes, good, but since we only publish four issues a year, each
containing three or four stories, we have to put aside these pretty good
stories.
What
we hope to publish instead are stories that surprise us with how good they are,
that do something unexpected and odd with language, that change the way we view
the world, even if only by a slight rotation. This does not mean that a story
needs to be written in some bizarre style, or feature freakishly unusual characters
or plot. But we do want to be surprised—the quality of surprise, after all, is
what all great works of literature have in common. It’s for this reason that it
is next to impossible to answer the question I most often hear at editorial
panels and discussions: “What kind of stories are you looking to publish in The Paris Review?” If we knew what
specifically we wanted to publish, then we would not be surprised when we read
it, and therefore we wouldn’t want it in the first place. This answer lacks the
concision and poetry of Styron’s statement, but it’s true just the same.
The remarkable stories by Karl Taro
Greenfeld, Lisa Halliday, and Daniel Kehlmann, all fit this description. They
are by turns funny, odd, magical, and revelatory, and they never fail to
surprise. All three of them are also fiction debuts, which represents the other
crucial mission of the magazine—to publish new voices alongside more
established masters of the form. Taken together they represent the best The Paris
Review has to offer and I greatly look forward to seeing the way a live
audience responds to them on February 11.
Link
to Styron’s Letter to An Editor:
http://theparisreview.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5220
Permanent link: http://www.symphonyspace.org/blogs/artists_producers/21
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