The Paris Review; Volume 49, No. 182, Fall 2007

New York, N.Y.: The Paris Review Foundation, 2007. Presumed first printing thus. Soft Cover. Very good. 184 pages. Contains works of fiction by Richard Price, J. Robert Lennon, Danielle Evans, and Stephen King. Also contains interviews with August Kleinzahler, Marilyn Chin, Edward Hirsch, Roger Mitchell, Edward Nobles, H. L. Hix, Rob Dennis, Mc Hyland, Lisa Russ Spaar, and David Lehman on the art of poetry. Also contains a story by James Mollison about Pablo Emilio Escobar of the Medellin cocaine smuggling cartel, including his mug shot and many photographs in color and in black and white. The Paris Review is a quarterly English-language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. In its first five years, The Paris Review published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, and Robert Bly. The Review's "Writers at Work" series includes interviews with Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, and Vladimir Nabokov, among many hundreds of others. Literary critic Joe David Bellamy called the series "one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world." An editorial statement, penned in the inaugural issue by William Styron, stated the magazine's aim: The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines. [...] 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.