It seems that Philip Gourevitch will soon be ending his tenure at the Paris Review, and there has been much speculation as to who will replace him at the venerable quarterly. I don’t keep up with American literature (I don’t know why, but I tend not to connect with much of it) so most of the candidates that pundits, if that’s what you call them in the world of literary journals, are suggesting are completely unfamiliar to me. But in an essay at The Millions, Garth Risk Hallberg suggests the highly unlikely Dave Eggers for the post. And he makes a convincing argument.
I’d be genuinely interested in seeing what a Paris Review edited by Eggers would look like. The best thing about McSweeney’s in the early days was opening it up to find something entirely new, daring authors whose works you may have never encountered before. I (clearly) wasn’t around to see The Paris Review in its early days, but I can only imagine that it was much like that. McSweeney’s stopped being like that a while ago, which was a big part of why I canceled my subscription. Too much Roddy Doyle and Lawrence Weschler. It would be interesting to see if Eggers can take an institution with much more serious traditions like the Art of Fiction interview series and apply the same sort of energy and ingenuity that he brought to the recent Panorama issue.
