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October 30, 2009

TEV GIVEAWAY: THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS, I - IV

PRI Box - Black
If you've paid any attention whatsoever to TEV over the years, you'll know that we're just ga-ga about The Paris Review Interviews series.  As each volume has come out, we've pretty much gobbled it up and they keep ending up in the Recommended sidebar for good reason.  There is no better archive of the working process of the world's great writers.

With the release of the latest installment, The Paris Review Interviews IV - which features the likes of Philip Roth, Ezra Pound, Haruki Murakami, and Marilynne Robinson, our friends at Picador have very generously offered up two complete boxed sets for a pair of lucky TEV readers.  Here's Roth:

INTERVIEWER: You spoke of the last phase of writing a novel being a “crisis” in which you turn against the material and hate the work. Is there always this crisis, with every book?

ROTH: Always. Months of looking at the manuscript and saying, “This is wrong—but what’s wrong?” I ask myself, “If this book were a dream, it would be a dream of what?” But when I’m asking this I’m also trying to believe in what I’ve written, to forget that it’s writing and to say, “This has taken place,” even if it hasn’t. The idea is to perceive your invention as a reality that can be understood as a dream. The idea is to turn flesh and blood into literary characters and literary characters; into flesh and blood.

And here's a sample manuscript page from The Anatomy Lesson:

Roth-p

The rules remain the same: Drop us an email, subject line: "WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS".  You must, must, must include your full mailing address to qualify.  We will take all entrants until 6 p.m. PST on Sunday, November 1, at which point the Random Number Generator will shine its light on two very fortunate TEV readers.  Until then.

UPDATE: Congratulations to the winners of our most popular giveaway to date, Mike Fisher and Kerry Hubers.  (And for those who get frustrated at the lack of RNG love, you should know Kerry is a TEV Giveaway long timer whose number finally came up!)

Posted at 10:08 AM in Giveaways |

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Comments

carl todasco

Great Books to read.

Posted by: carl todasco | October 30, 2009 at 11:43 AM

Niall

I'm not a fan of Philip Roth's work, but his comment above is spot on.

Posted by: Niall | October 31, 2009 at 09:30 AM

Alexandra Boland

Is this open to entrants overseas?

Posted by: Alexandra Boland | November 02, 2009 at 04:28 AM

Kerry

Thanks very much, Mark. And, yes, never despair. When things seem their darkest, the RNG may go your way. Of course, it might not. For the frustrated, there's always tomorrow. For me, I'll always have Paris! Thanks, Mark.

Posted by: Kerry | November 06, 2009 at 06:12 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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