Lunch with the Paris Review

The Financial Times sits down for a lunchtime chat with Lorin Stein, the new editor of the Paris Review. Recent kerfuffles aside (and unmentioned), the FT makes as if the Paris Review is primed for a renaissance:

Stein wants, he says, to renew the Review’s original compact with fiction and poetry because it seems more important than ever to argue for a certain kind of literature through a certain kind of literary journal. “You can be as smart and as stylish and as sophisticated and as cosmopolitan in poetry and fiction as you can be in non-fiction,” he says, “and the corollary of that is that you don’t have to be polite about it, you don’t have to be pious about it.”

The contents of his first issue, which will appear on September 9, illustrate his argument: interviews on the art of fiction Norman Rush – the author of Mating and Mortals is, he says, one of the great contemporary American authors at the height of his powers – and Michel Houellebecq, one of the most surprising. The content, Stein says, “is all fun – which is not unrelated to the fact that it expresses a very particular idea of what’s going on in fiction and poetry – mine.”