The Paris Review's Blog, page 918

The Man Who Saw Tomorrow

For a while after college, one of my husband Joe’s best friends worked at a used books–and-CDs store in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where we all grew up. It was called McKay but everyone called it McKay’s—a tiny but somehow crucial distinction—and it was a wonderland of dog-eared pages and scratched ninety-two-cent discs and ineffable smells of humanity. Michael was always bringing home strange treasures that he’d eventually sell back for the exact amount he’d paid, but sometimes things would be too good not to hold onto. One summer Joe’s birthday merited a particularly special gift: a slim black paperback with a creased cover bearing a photo of a goateed man staring out from the center of a pink orb. Flaming rainbows flanked him on either side, and rays of light shot out from underneath his likeness. If anyone ever warranted such a wonder of post-midcentury graphic design, it was surely this man, Doc Anderson, who was, as his book cover proclaimed in yellow caps, THE MAN WHO SEES TOMORROW.

The book was published in 1970, its spine proclaiming it a “Paperback Library Occult Original” (retail price: seventy-five cents). It’s part biography and part defensive exegesis of Anderson’s psychic pronouncements, all researched and compiled by Robert E. Smith, which seems to be a pseudonym for one Warren B. Smith, who penned dozens of books on paranormal and cryptozoological subjects during his decades-long career. (A sampling from his bibliography: Let's Face Facts About Flying Saucers, 1967; Strange Abominable Snowmen, 1970, Lost Cities of the Ancients—Unearthed!, 1976; and, inexplicably, The Sensual Male, 1971.)

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Remembering Sendak, Gaining Honors

Book sales around the world in real time.
America’s Next Top Writer ?
The Columbia custodian turned Columbia honors grad!
Maurice Sendak’s life in pictures.
Sendak speaking on his eightieth birthday.

A Great Stag, Broad-Antlered: Rediscovering Hyam Plutzik

Plutzik as a professor at the University of Rochester, around 1950. This photo was taken by one of his students.

The conclusion of Hyam Plutzik’s 1962 poem, Horatio, provide an apt commentary on Plutzik’s own unobtrusive presence in the world of American letters:

A great stag came out of the woods,

Broad-antlered, approaching slowly on the moonlit field,

And looked about him like a king and re-entered the dark.

The seismic shifts in American culture since 1960 have made footing precarious indeed for those broad-antlered poets who wrote in a hieratic and philosophic diction. Eschewing the more vernacular excursions of the Beats or the confessional poets of the 1970s, Plutzik published three full collections of poems, the last, Horatio, an eighty-nine-page dramatic poem in which Hamlet’s friend grapples with the charge to “report me and my cause aright.”

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Win Two Tickets to See John Irving, Live

As fans of John Irving know, interviews with the legendary writer are rare indeed. So the chance to see Irving interviewed live don’t come around every day. But this Friday, he’ll sit down for an hour-long radio chat with Ron Bennington, and you could be in the audience. (Provided you can get to Manhattan!)

Here’s how it works: write the jacket copy—no more than five sentences—describing Irving’s imaginary next novel. Topics may include, but need not be restricted to, bears, wrestling, New England, sex workers, writers, and Vienna. (Probably at least two would be a good idea.)

Please submit all entries to contests@theparisreview.org by noon EST, Thursday, May 10.

R.I.P. Maurice Sendak

Photo by John Dugdale.

It is with great sadness that we note the death, at eighty-three, of legendary writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak. In books like Where the Wild Things Are, Outside Over There, The Nutshell Library, The Sign on Rosie’s Door and many more, Sendak defined childhood for many of us.

Last September, we ran this interview with Mr. Sendak; his inimitable wit, wisdom, and legendary cantankerousness came through loud and clear.

Rushdie Is Bored, Pynchon Goes Public

The creator of publishing tumblr Real Talk has unmasked herself! It’s GOOD magazine executive editor Ann Friedman.
Salman Rushdie .
A great what-if: Bond by Hitchcock.
The seven best dinner parties in literature? We say Anna Karenina was robbed!
Brace yourselves for Pynchon in Public Day.

Rushdie Is Bored; Pynchon Goes Public

The creator of publishing tumblr Real Talk has unmasked herself! It’s GOOD magazine executive editor Ann Friedman.
Salman Rushdie .
A great what-if: Bond by Hitchcock.
The seven best dinner parties in literature? We say Anna Karenina was robbed!
Brace yourselves for Pynchon in Public Day.

Happy Golden Anniversary!

We're delighted to wish a happy fiftieth to an organization we think a lot of: Choice Magazine Listening.

Founded in 1962 by the (wonderfully named) philanthropist LuEsther Mertz, CML is a free, nationwide service that provides magazine content to the visually impaired via quarterly audio anthologies in several formats. The anthologies have included the work of everyone from John Updike to Alice Munro, and we’re proud to say that over the years, The Paris Review has been well represented.

If you know someone who would enjoy this free service, please call 1-888-724-6423 or e-mail choicemag@aol.com. Many happy returns!

Stillspotting

I’m sitting in an apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. It’s a nice apartment, with decidedly un-Ikea furniture and mild-mannered art on the walls. It feels well kept but welcoming, gently used. The room I’m in is a classic New York living/dining-room combo, its zones delineated by, on the one hand, a multicolored wood table and, on the other, a sleek white couch.

The couch looks surprisingly comfortable, but I have no idea if it is; I’m sitting back-to-back with it, on a triangular block of foam. There’s a semicircle of these foam stools filling the room’s neutral territory and six people sitting with me. As we wait in awkward and anticipatory silence, I notice the sunlight streaming in from the windows. It glosses the shiny floors, which stay that way, I assume, because everyone who enters this apartment has been told to remove her shoes, just like in my home growing up.

I don’t know who lives here. According to a map the Guggenheim has given me, this is “Erin’s House.” Erin is nowhere to be found, but she has generously loaned out her living/dining room for a few weekends in April and May, for a project called Stillspotting. As its name implies, the project is a search for still spots—quiet spaces, moments of respite, refuge from chaos—in New York.

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The 1966: Spring’s Smartest Tee

In celebration of its two-hundredth issue, The Paris Review is proud to present the Winter 1966 T-shirt. Modeled on a nifty shirt that we discovered on the back cover of issue 36, the design is George Plimpton’s own. As he stated in that ad, it’s “the sort of once in a very rare while shirt that makes an editor proud to do his job.”

To celebrate the ’66, we took to the street, asking some New York friends to name their favorite Paris Review authors. Watch this space to see their picks.

And for a limited time we’re offering a special deal: the T-shirt plus a year’s subscription for $40, giving you access to the greatest writers (and T-shirts!) of today.

Printed on American Apparel 50/25/25’s, the shirt comes in men’s (S, M, L) and women’s sizes (M, L).

To quote George, we beg you to “share with us the thrill of wearing it.”

Offer good for U.S. addresses only.