Philip Gourevitch, author of the award-winning novel \We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda,"" will come to Madison as part of this weekend's Wisconsin Book Festival.
He recently talked with The Daily Cardinal about his revival of the esteemed Paris Review, the fate of literature and some of Madison's finest bookstores.
The Daily Cardinal: What will you talk about at this weekend's Wisconsin Book Festival?
Philip Gourevitch: Well, I'm going to be talking about the Paris Review, and why a literary magazine of this type comes out quarterly. [This is a magazine] whose only basis for choosing what to publish is that it's writing of the highest excellence-fresh, illuminating and enlarging about the world-why a magazine like that is not only not anachronistic or peculiar, but is actually vital to these times.
DC: Do you think a message like that about the Paris Review is easy to get across in these times?
PG: Sure, if I didn't think that it was a solid message-I mean it's not a message, it's a truth-if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't have this job. I could be busy writing for The New Yorker with a circulation of 1.3 million.
So I came here [to the Paris Review] to do this as well, because I believe it's one of the best ways to spend a life, and to serve literature and to serve readers, frankly. This is how writing is kept alive.
I sometimes say the Paris Review is like the anti-blog-it's writing for people with attention spans. It's not an anti-blog in the sense that I'm against blogs-I read them too.
But there's still the idea of sitting in a chair, reading something that doesn't have an expiration date from the day it was born.
To read something that has a certain quality of timelessness and is really eternal. To let it absorb you as much as you absorb it, that's all pretty valuable stuff, and that's what we're here for.
I do not believe anything about the death of the novel, the death of fiction, the death of poetry, the death of literature, the death of literacy. Tthese things have been announced and trumpeted a long time, and all the people who've said it are all dead-literature's fine.
DC: Do you think literature has a little bit tougher time in these days of blogs, where everyone can get everything at the drop of a hat?
PG: Well, if they weren't having blogs, there would be something else. The alcoholism rate in this country used to be much higher, people used to be just stinko-drunk in the middle of the day in most parts of the world-that must have been hard to keep them reading novels. In the 19th century, everybody drank all day long, but nobody says, ""Oh boy, the 19th century, that was hell on novelists-you couldn't get anybody sober enough to read! And they didn't have electric lighting either!""
But now they say, ""The 19th century, that's when people really loved literature. What I'm saying is if you let yourself get all freaked out because there's a poll that says people read less, all that is troubling, but the question is, does that mean there's any reason to stop putting good literature out in the best form and trying to get it into people's hands? No, there's more reason to do so, and there's probably more hunger for it.
DC: Could you tell a little bit about relaunching the Paris Review?
PG: The problem the Paris Review had was that its founding editor, George Plimpton, died in 2003 after 50 years of running the magazine. The magazine had been very closely identified with him. A year and a half [after his death] the board looked for somebody to take it on fully and give it a new life-not to reject its legacy but to kind of look at it as much more than a legacy, but something with a future.
That's where I came along, I heard the magazine was looking for an editor and that they were serious when I started talking to them about really letting me run the magazine and reshape it. When I say, ""reshape it,"" I mean, ""resuscitate or revitalize it.""
We still do what the magazine always did-we publish predominantly fiction, poetry, interviews with fiction writers and poets, and some non-fiction.
We publish debut fiction by previously unpublished American writers. We've published a remarkable series of interviews with Chinese outcasts by one of China's most harassed dissident writers, for the first time in English.
These things have been tremendously popular, and people have been coming back and asking for more. What's more gratifying than taking a guy who's in hiding from the Chinese police and publishing his stuff here in such a way that an American reader suddenly goes, ""Wait a minute, this isn't obscure, strange or intellectual, this is extremely entertaining and enormously informative.""
DC: Is there a particular reason you decided to come to Madison?
PG: I was invited and I know that Madison is one of the great book towns there is. The last time I was there was when I was tagging along with the Kerry campaign as a reporter for The New Yorker. The election had become sufficiently depressing and boring that I spent most of my time in some of the really great bookstores. I came home with a loot of used books.
