The Paris Review, one of our most enduring literary magazines, has redesigned its website and “debuted’ its digital archive, making it easier for subscribers to nose around and find any given issue from the magazine’s decades-long, continent-spanning history. At the Daily blog, editor Dan Piepenbring announced the change:
Now you can read every short story and poem, every portfolio, every hastily doodled authorial self-portrait, and every introductory notice from the unassailable George Plimpton, who used to use the front of the magazine to brag about its ever-longer masthead. (“It is extremely difficult to extricate oneself—rather like being stuck in a bramble bush.”)
Most of the content (except for the always-available writers on writing) is only perusable for subscribers. Still, it’s quite an incentive to subscribe or at least sign up for a free trial; I can’t imagine a loftier distraction during this dark month than losing oneself amongst the virtual cobblestones of poetry, fiction, essays and interviews by many of the biggest names in literature from Atwood to Neruda, from Cummings to Keraouac.