For the first time in forty years, The Paris Review will serialize a novel: Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich, illustrated by Leanne Shapton. Also in the issue: a John Jeremiah Sullivan essay, interviews with Anne Beattie and Janet Malcolm, and more.
Please excuse the ugliness. I need to update WordPress, and once that’s done the remainders will be back in the middle column where they belong. It’s still quiet here, I know, and that’s because, yes, I’m still working on my novel. 73,500 words, eight of ten chapters revised, nearing the end but not there yet. I find myself relating a . . .
“I never cease to be astonished by his insight, his freshness, his brevity (deep problems treated like cold baths: in and out as quickly as possible)…” Geoff Dyer praises the inexhaustible Friedrich Nietzsche.
Fiction and autobiography edition, featuring Somerset Maugham, Alexander Chee, Joan Didion, Jean Rhys, and Graham Greene, and (semi-estranged) half-sisters AS Byatt and Margaret Drabble “Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that, looking back, I can hardly distinguish one from the other.” — Somerset Maugham (in video above) “I sat down to write a conventionally autobiographical novel. . . .