Now that I am more kindly disposed toward The Paris Review—the literary institution founded by George Plimpton and a cohort of his pals back in the wild and crazy 1950s—since they have dropped the hyperbolic “DNA of literature” slogan, I am pleased to pass on the news of the newest volume of The Paris Review Interviews (Picador) and in fact, the offering of a slip-covered set of all the extant volumes.

Some of the interviewees in this volume include Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Kurt Vonnegut, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Price, Joan Didion, Gabriel García Márquez, Philip Larkin, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Stephen King, Robert Lowell, Ralph Ellison, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Maya Angelou, Haruki Murakami, Paul Auster, Marilynne Robinson, and, of course many more.

Old pal Colum McCann, an excitable boy, enthuses:

The Paris Review books should be given out at dinner parties, readings, riots, weddings, galas—shindigs of every shape. And they’re perfect for the classroom too, from high schools all the way to MFA programs. In fact, I run a whole semester-long creative writing class based on the interviews. How else would I get the world’s greatest living writers, living and dead, to come into the classroom with their words of wisdom, folly and fury? These books are wonderful, provocative, indispensable.

While I am at it I feel compelled to make mention of a number of recent interviews that, if not indispensable, are significant by virtue of their subjects. There is no one like Gore Vidal for both his grasp of American history and clear-eyed, unsentimental analysis. His chat in London with Johann Hari features such gems as:

I was like everyone else when Obama was elected—optimistic. Everything we had been saying about racial integration was vindicated,” he says, “but he’s incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It’s a pity because he’s the first intellectual president we’ve had in many years, but he can’t hack it. He’s not up to it. He’s overwhelmed. And who wouldn’t be? The United States is a madhouse. The country should be put away—and we’re being told to go away. Nothing makes any sense.” The President “wants to be liked by everybody, and he thought all he had to do was talk reason. But remember—the Republican Party is not a political party. It’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth. It’s full of hatred. You’re not going to get them aboard. Don’t even try. The only way to handle them is to terrify them. He’s too delicate for that.

And for good measure the Atlantic offers up a snappy Q&A notable for:

In one recent interview, you referred to FDR as a great man.

He was a very great man.

But you opposed his foreign policy.

Well, of course. FDR was damaging the Republic by his imperial ways.

How do you reconcile that with your affection for him?

It’s like saying, “I like you and your wife, but I’m not coming to your house for supper because she’s the worst cook whom I’ve ever submitted to.” Would that be considered misogyny or venom and viciousness? I’m supposedly very vicious, trying to destroy people all the time. I’m simply saying that she may be a wonderful wife, and I adore being with her—but I won’t eat a meal at her house. I have this same problem with Jack Kennedy. He was a good friend—witty, sharp, and very smart. I would rather be with him than practically anybody now alive. But what did he do for us in a thousand days? He invades Cuba, fucks up, and brings the world close to a nuclear collision over the so-called missiles down there in Cuba. Deplorable.

And for good measure:

Who is the best leader in the Democratic Party right now?

Do you mean, Who can give the best speech? Who can raise the most money? Look, I’m not a sentimentalist. Nor am I a romantic. I don’t believe in the Great Man theory of history. Great men come along very seldom—and when they do, it’s pretty bloody. But, as once observed, God looks after alcoholics, little children, and the United States of America.

Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridien) reportedly finds interviews anathema (which explains their dearth), but he recently sat down with John Jurgensen and director John Hillcoat (The Road) in San Antonio and chatted about this and that including the forthcoming theatrical release of the film based on The Road. My favorite quote:

WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?

CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [my son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

Recently I mentioned Umberto Eco’s latest project and book and coincidentally Der Spiegel published a detailed conversation with Don Umberto that is most illuminating indeed. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 20, 2009

The mantle of unacknowledgement falls on many shoulders beyond the poetic brotherhood (and sisterhood): librarians, primary school teachers, booksellers, and so forth. The many small (this description apparently refers to circulation size) magazines and their preternaturally dedicated staffs existing across the U.S. and the known world are overqualified for this honorable designation.

The newly redesigned Ploughshares is one of my favorites based on its policy of having each issue guested. This recent issue was compiled by author and memoirist Kathyrn Harrison and anthologizes 20 essays, of which Harrison writes:

What connects these narratives is that they are true, and represent a struggle, a particular struggle whose value I can’t overstate. The author of each labored to put words to his or her experience. To articulate it, to speak it, to write it honestly, which requires something more than effort. Each made a commitment essential to writing about one’s own life, a promise that goes far beyond the act of writing.

Is the personal essay a narcissistic form? Not when it succeeds as art. Narcissus perished because he fell in love with his reflection. The twenty writers whose work is collected in this volume pushed past the masks all of us present to the mirror, the neighbor, the spouse. The commitment they’ve made is to report what they find under the surface of their lives no matter how disappointing, threatening, or admirable. Because our virtues are difficult to own, perhaps even more than our faults.

Open City continues to offer offbeat gems and a variety of unorthodoxies. The Summer 2009 issue by editors Thomas Beller and Johanna Yas contains fiction by Vestal McIntyre, Eva Marer, Zachary Lazar, and A.M. Homes, with nonfiction from Bryan Charles, Patricia Bosworth (on Lois Gould), and Edmund White (on Harold Brodkey), plus poetry by Billy Collins.

The venerable Paris Review contains its trademark mélange of literary nuggets, including an interview with Gay Talese on the art of nonfiction. You can also read my conversation with Gay Talese here.

A Public Space, which is a somewhat recent entry into the literary fray, publishes wonderful writing, some by familiar names like Samantha Hunt, Yiyun Li, Adrienne Rich, Matthew Zapruder, and Carl Phillips—and many more by names that will become familiar. —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 26, 2009

Luckily, only a quartet of so-called small (literary) magazines have chosen to subscribe me. Any more and I am certain I would have to start making ruthless and painful decisions about my reading queue. I see such magazines as the victory gardens, boutique vintners, and truck farms of America’s bounteous literary cornucopia. Pick up almost any one of the few hundred published on paper and the odds are that some piece of writing, design, image, or bon mot will penetrate the buzzing and blooming confusion.

Ploughshares has a policy of being guest-edited, and I have frequently been charmed by the thoughtful introductory remarks by those guests. In the winter 2008-09 edition, poet Jean Valentine doesn’t disappoint, as she concludes:

I know editing this issue’s poetry [there are also six stories—RB] was something I thought I should do: I had no idea of the joys it would bring. The country, in one of its deeper dark moments, is full of good poets. They could have filled many issues of Ploughshares—what I was looking for was the chill sliver of poetry. I was biting a coin to see if it was real.

Her introduction begins and ends quoting from poet Odysseus Elytis:

Here’s why I write. Because Poetry begins there where death had not the final word.

Brigid Hughes, who was the editor of The Paris Review while George Plimpton walked this earth (and for a short time after his passing), has focused her considerable talent and taste into fabricating A Public Space, a magazine containing a literary salad of John Haskell, Peter Orner, Tom Drury, Walter Murch, Anne Carson, Sven Birkerts, Elliot Weinberger, and Mary Jo Bang and a modernity of graphic design.

Glimmertrain is edited by sisters Susan and Linda from the benign (west) coast, where one can find an oasis of sensibility known as Portland, Ore. From issue 69:

We’re sending this issue to press just weeks before the November 4 election, an old chapter closing and a new one pushing open. And for the two of us, as well: We have now both crossed into our second half-century, and life is as compelling as it’s ever been. It’s good being alive, being sisters, and doing this work.

The winter 2009 edition includes stories by Fredrick Reiken and Thisbe Nissen and an interview with Colum McCann.

I spent one languid afternoon last summer amusing myself alternately watching the dogs frisking around my son’s backyard and studying the Open City back issue index, which includes a poem, “I Am a Pizza,” by Monica Lewinsky—which is to say one never knows what one will find.

In this latest iteration the only writer I am familiar with is Brad Gooch (City Poet). Apparently Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas are busily fomenting much literature and creativity not only with the magazine, but also with their eponymous book imprint and outdoor reading series, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and Moistworks, a music blog. —Robert Birnbaum, Feb. 19, 2009