Showing posts with label The Paris Reivew. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Paris Reivew. Show all posts

Friday, April 5, 2019

FFM: FANTASTIC, September 1974, edited by Ted White; THE PARIS REVIEW, Autumn 1974, edited by George Plimpton; THE ONTARIO REVIEW, Autumn 1974, edited by Raymond J. Smith; THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, September 1974, edited by Edward Ferman

Late Summer 1974
Remarkable what an almost random look backward can turn up. 45 years ago. Not too long before I first began reading the magazines, and had already read some stories from them, or would first read them in that year and the next. I had my tenth birthday in August of 1974, and while I wasn't too fond of how life in general was going, I was more than happy enough about what I was finding in literature of various sorts. 

 As I consider the four magazines here now, it occurs to me that all four were eclectic in their remit to a greater degree than most of their peers, and openly so...two in making clear that they mixed fantasy (of all sorts, including horror fiction) and science fiction (and were certainly willing to publish some notable fiction that wasn't fantasy or sf by any reasonable standard on occasion, or impressive stories which could be considered truly fantasticated only by squinting very hard...in the 1970s, Stuart Dybek's "Horror Movie" or Edward Wellen's short novel Goldbrick in F&SF, or Bill Pronzini and Barry Malzberg's "Another Burnt-Out Case" or Jack Dann's "Days of Stone" in Fantastic come to mind), the other two in being open to a greater degree to all sorts of fiction than many of their little-magazine peers (perhaps only the Boston-based and not the CCNY Fiction, Antaeus and TriQuarterly were as eclectic in the '70s), and proclaiming their internationality in their very titles, an English-language magazine initially out of Paris, an intentionally interculturally Anglophone North American magazine initially out of border city Windsor, Ontario. All four were founded in a certain spirit of defiance as well as openness, ambition beyond simply attempting to produce good magazines, and all found themselves a matter of a certain degree of controversy as a result (though in The Paris Review's case, much of that controversy was generated by the ultimate source of some of its funding, as the facts of CIA involvement went from quietly rumored to documented and revealed).  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction began publishing in 1949, Fantastic in 1952, The Paris Review in 1953...and while this was the first issue of The Ontario Review, the geist of the magazine was not too different from that of its not too elderly peers.

 --much more to come--see indices below:




























































































Fantastic Stories [v23 #6, September 1974] Ted White, editor (75¢, 132pp, digest, cover by Jeff Jones)
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [v47 #3, #280, September 1974] edited by Edward Ferman (75¢, 164pp, digest, cover by Jeannine Guertin)

 The Paris Review #59 Fall, 1974 $1.95

 FICTION
Frederick Busch Widow Water
Lamar Herrin The Rio Loja Ring-Master
Mike Kempton Long Green
Ray Russell Rational Moments
David Shaber Progress Report

INTERVIEW
Gore Vidal The Art of Fiction No. 50

POETRY
Ameen Alwan Two Poems
Paul Anderson Falling
Maxine Chernoff Two Poems
W. K. Engel Two Poems
Albert Goldbarth Organization
Thomas Johnson Two Poems
Erica Jong Wrinkles
Erica Jong Becoming a Nun
Greg Kuzma Two Poems
Naomi Lazard Two Poems
David Lehman Greeting Where No Kindness Is
Molly McKaughan Ms. Delilah Hoffritz
Rush Rankin Poem
Vern Rutsala You
Ira Sadoff Five Poems
Aram Saroyan Two Poems
Louis Simpson Three Poems
Albert Stainton The Limestone Statue Boxing Factory
Charles Webb Two Poems

FEATURE
Peter Ardery In Memoriam

ART
William Wegman Portfolio of Drawings



The Ontario Review #1 Fall 1974 $2.50


 INTERVIEW
A Conversation with Philip Roth by Joyce Carol Oates 9

POETRY
Stanley Cooperman, from The Jerusalem Poems 23 
Conrad Hilberry, Two for Alfred North Whitehead 28 
Miroslav Holub, Loneliness of the Minotaur 30 
Ernest Sandeen, T wo Poems 31 
J. Michael Yates, from Burn Tissue Cycle 47 
John Ditsky, Three Poems 50 
John R. Reed, Love Poem 53
Derk Wynand, Snowscapes 54 
Tom Wayman, Three Poems 67 
William Heyen, Two Poems 71 
Philip J. Klukoff, Deaf Mute 74 
Carl Dennis, Prowlers 75 
Robert Bringhurst, For Robert Grosseteste 76

FICTION
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Lucca 33 
Bill Henderson, Pop 56

GRAPHICS
A. G. Smith, Landscapes from Coastal Carolina 41

ESSAY
Paul Marx, Harvey Swados 62

REVIEWS
John R. Reed, Instructive Alchemies 78 
Linda W. Wagner, Four Young Poets 89 
Gloria Whelan, The Poem as Myth 98 
Raymond Smith and Joyce Carol Oates, Briefly Noted 102 
Notes on Contributors 107 

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Friday, March 8, 2013

FFB: THE HARPER'S FORUM BOOK: WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? edited by Jack Hitt (Citadel 1991); THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS, Vol II, edited by Philip Gourevitch (Picador 2007)

Transcripts of a Bunch of Writers Talking.


In 1984, Harper's, which had been fading as a magazine (into the shadows of its traditional rival The Atlantic Monthly and the comparative upstart The New Yorker, neither at their own height at that point), finally broke out of the cocoon that had formed around it. It retained its one most notable flavor from previous years--Lewis Lapham was back as editor, after Michael Kinsley had been installed for a long (dull) lunch, and again was a more felt presence than the other two magazines could boast (I read the Atlantic in those years and can't for the life of me remember the name of the editor; the precious William Shawn of TNY was entirely too obvious in hiding). The "new" Harper's was proud of its new regular features, including the Harper's Index (which was even syndicated to newspapers for a number of years), the excerpts and reprints in the front of the "book," umbrella-titled "Readings"...and a new feature, usually spearheaded by staffer Jack Hitt, in which a panel of (it was hoped) relevant and engaging folks were asked to chew over (at least) a reasonably interesting proposition...so, Robert Bloch, Suzy McKee Charnas, Gahan Wilson and Harlan Ellison were asked to collectively develop a sequel to Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart"; Donald Westlake, Nancy Pickard, Peter Lovesey, Tony Hillerman and Sarah Caudwell were called upon to devise A Perfect Murder; advertising agencies and publicity teams were asked to devise campaigns for the Seven Deadly Sins, the return of Jesus of Nazareth, and the next US President; W. H. Auden's brief rhapsody about what his concept of heaven might be was offered as a model to representatives of various magazines (Readers' Digest's editor managed in one windy,self-congratulatory sentence to nominate his wife, unsurprisingly like RD itself far more smarmy than charming). Gregory Benford, Carl Sagan, William Burroughs, John Simon and a similarly amusing mix of others were asked to supplement the audio recording representing humanity and the Earth on the Voyager spacecraft...and thus a flaw in the strength of this project...while Hitt and his colleagues actually would seek out people who knew what they were talking about for these encounters--whether face to face in a restaurant or office, or virtual (via, in the '80s, a bulletin board system) or in typical magazine fashion, as with the Auden in heaven piece, gathering discrete mss. on a theme--sometimes the diversity was a bit lacking, unless forced to be otherwise...no women on the supplement to Voyager panel, for example, and the discussion titled "Only Mankind's Presence Can Save Nature" was rather too correctly notated by the exclusion of women from the discussion as well as the proposition. (No lack of ethnic diversity, if again no women, in the LA gang life discussion, not so surprisingly.) But that Hitt and company did reach out beyond Usual Suspects to bring in people who might have something intelligent and unpackaged to say about the topics at hand helped make this feature of the remade magazine's first decade a pretty continuous highlight.

The Paris Review, of course, was among the models for the Harper's redesign, visually as well as in content and approach...TPR had irregular but recurring features such as the "Como Conversazione"s and "The Man in the Back Has a Question" which were also fora for panel discussion (a form, I hasten to admit, not exactly invented by either magazine, but also one given more regular prominence by these two than most theoretically "intellectual" magazines)...unfortunately, the Review hasn't seen fit to collect or systematically offer those features on the web or in anthology form, so we settle for their most prominent nonfiction feature, appearing in every issue since the first, the long one-on-one interview, usually with a writer and a part of the series "The Art of Fiction" (though there are also corresponding series about poetry, nonfiction, visual art, etc.). I suspect there is essentially no one reading this for whom this is news, particularly since the Review is probably the only (essentially) US magazine over the last half-century to be so well-known for its interviews as to rival Playboy thus; even Interview or Rolling Stone aren't quite in the running. And while the interviews are now posted on the web, one can always wonder about the continued availability of them electronically (if both the magazine and the Internet Archive are persuaded to take them down eventually)...in any case, the volume cited here today begins with Graham Greene and ends with Stephen King, including James Thurber, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Alice Munro between, and while these interviews sometimes fail to plumb the depths of their subjects, it's not for lack of trying. I simply wish that the Review would make more of their plural-participant transcripts available again one way or another...the crime-fiction-issue discussion of a decade back was particularly good.

And while on the topic of magazines: Doug Ellis's list of all the US pulp magazines and their publishers...not absolutely complete (almost an impossibility) but far more than a Good Start. This also useful for those hipsters who love to call paperbacks, men's sweat magazines and other non-pulps "pulp"...

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
Happy International Women's Day!

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