Q&A Philip Gourevitch

ON TUESDAY NIGHT, The Paris Review opened the doors to its handsome, capacious office in lower Manhattan to celebrate its newest issue, #179. The desks seemed to have vanished; in their place were long tables heaped with vodka, whiskey, and potato chips. Much was made when founding editor George Plimpton died in 2003 about the end of an era, and surely this after-work fete had nothing on the legendary madcap parties he used to throw at his (and the review's) old home on the Upper East Side. But amid the loud, vivacious throng of young writers and editors -- and the place was packed with them -- it was easy to conjure the review's early days in 1950s Paris, when it was barely more than an idea in the minds of its ambitious, if yet-unpublished founders, a handful of ex-pats in their mid-20s -- Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and Plimpton -- looking to prove themselves.

Of course, Philip Gourevitch, who assumed the editorship in 2005, doesn't quite fit that profile. At 45, the New Yorker staff writer has won numerous awards for his two books of nonfiction, "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families" (1998), about the Rwandan genocide, and "A Cold Case" (2001), the re-investigation of a 1970 New York double homicide. Less known, however, is that Gourevitch studied fiction at Columbia and has published stories in small magazines. The prospect of reviving that latent self is what drew him, in part, to The Paris Review: "The fiction writer and reader in me had been dormant for a while, and I was interested in reconnecting with that," he told me last weekend at his home in Brooklyn.

As editor, Gourevitch wants to combine the literary and the journalistic -- to address our fractious times in magazine style, but at a quarterly's pace. "I find that literary magazines are too out of touch with the world, and in-touch-with-the-world magazines are too out of touch with literature, and I thought this would be a good hybrid form," he said. On his watch, circulation has nearly doubled, to 12,000, making it four to five times higher than that of the average literary quarterly.

Much of the old journal remains intact, and indeed this fall Gourevitch celebrated one of the most venerable Paris Review departments, its long interviews with writers, by publishing a collection showcasing 16 greats, from Hemingway to Didion. But there are new additions as well, like the "Encounters" rubric, which plays off the Q&A format but features lepers and prisoners, for instance, in place of famous writers, and has helped infuse the journal with new life and relevance. Gourevitch and I talked about this and other changes.

IDEAS: One of the main functions of a small magazine has often been to give a platform to its founders -- who then grow up and move on. How has The Paris Review survived?

GOUREVITCH: Sometimes people create things that are just a good idea to have around, and nobody does it better. In the 1950s, literary journals were very much identified by an idea or school or fad -- some sort of posture or another. The Paris Review rejected that categorically. When Bill Styron was 27, he wrote a famous manifesto for the magazine's first issue. He wasn't an editor, but of the circle of young men who started it he was the only published novelist. In the manifesto he said literature is not in danger these days of being killed off by philistinism, but by learned chatter. It was very much an anti-intellectualizing response to literature. Ever since, "no literary criticism" has been the only rule the magazine has ever had. Because of this, it was able to see what was fresh and new in 1980 and 1990 without feeling an inner struggle with its own identity.

IDEAS: Has taking over such an established institution ever felt burdensome?

GOUREVITCH: We can't live off the legacy; we have to find new expression in a new time. But there are also traditions, like the interviews, which are identified so deeply with the magazine, and we need to try to live up to the standard of the best of them. I think we have. The trick of a quarterly is to make a magazine that's as compelling to read now, when you get your hands on it, as it will be a year from now. It's like a book: Ideally, the stuff we find should stand.

IDEAS: One of the places you've made a significant change is in the poetry department, publishing portfolios of multiple works by a single poet rather than only one or two. How has that been working out?

GOUREVITCH: Very well. When I came along the magazine was publishing 20 to 30 poems in an issue. It did not seem believable to me that there could be 100 good poems by all these different poets each year. And the way they were scattered here and there between the other pieces, without any particular kind of design, either physical or conceptual, made them feel piecemeal, like spot art.

Now, you have fewer poems per issue, but more of a chance to actually get to know a poet. It may not be Shakespeare, but it's a little bit like reading Shakespeare. The first few pages you think, How could I ever read this stuff? It feels so foreign. And then a couple pages later the language starts to click and it feels very familiar. Poetry is a little bit of a foreign language that way.

Poets are very excited about it because, although fewer of them get in, when they do get in it's a bigger sense of exposure and a stronger presence. And readers have really responded to it. I've had people say, "You know, I don't read poetry, but somehow I ended up reading five of them and now I've bought a book."

IDEAS: The "Encounter" series is another departure. Where did it come from?

GOUREVITCH: We created the rubric after stumbling onto these wonderful Chinese stories by Liao Yiwu. Then those attracted others. Dave Eggers sent us the one about Dan Bright, who told the Katrina story as a prisoner in the holding pen of the New Orleans jail. The one about the Serb assassin just came in over e-mail out of the blue.

IDEAS: Why a Q&A, and not another format?

GOUREVITCH: The Q&A is underrated as a form of literary creation. Unlike a profile, which is dominated by the voice of the writer, no matter how interesting the subject is, a Q&A privileges the voice of the subject, and does so in a way that can be pretty exciting. The "Encounter" format is a way of hearing from people who you'd never hear from, period. They've never been in the news, or if they have, they've only been seen as marginal players. If they know how to tell a story, and if they have an interesting voice and use interesting language, we can shape it into what I would consider something of literary value.

IDEAS: Are they an attempt, in part, to address the limits of fiction?

GOUREVITCH: One of my complaints with contemporary fiction, and even some journalism, is that it's never as colorful as life; it's timid by comparison to the strangeness of the world. We're living in a really outlandish time. You can barely pick up the paper without being surprised. There are wild things every week. We have enormously interesting villains in public life and in daily life. We have enormously interesting failures, huge dramatic events. And then you pick up fiction, and it's about the inability to have a romance.

Kate Bolick is senior editor of Domino magazine and teaches writing at New York University. Her interviews appear regularly in Ideas. E-mail kbolick@globe.com.