A friend of mine was a reader at the Paris Review. I was wondering about the veracity of some of his statements.
How many stories have you pulled from the slush and eventually published?
What percentage of your readers vetting submissions are high schoolers?
For those interested, below is the dude's account of what it was like interning at the Paris Review.
"OK, so here's the deal with the Paris Review. What this article (ed: I sent the guy an email asking him about it) says is true, kind of. They do have a well-organized system for combing through the slush, and reading the slush is the entire job of the "readers" (usually from the Columbia MFA program) as well as one of the side duties of the interns (unpaid full-time college students who do pretty much everything for the journal besides the actual editing work). It's true that a story has to get two rejections before it's tossed, and if it gets two passes it's read by everyone in the place; it goes in a special basket and there's a sheet attached to the cover where everyone writes their comments. This all gelled with my idealism quite nicely, at first.
"But here's the thing. The Paris Review almost never takes anything from the slush to publish in the magazine. When I worked there, they told me that it had happened once over a year ago, with a story about an autistic piano player, but that it was almost unprecedented. And that seems about right. Invariably the stories that got two passes would go around the office, acquiring comments, sometimes very positive ones... and then they'd disappear and we'd never hear anything about them again. I think those people get personalized rejections from one of the interns or an editor, which is cool, and I'm a lot less put off by it now that I've seen the truly nasty side of publishing through my job. But there is something about the system that's a little bothersome, because even though all this time and energy is being expended on the submissions, everyone in the place knows better than to take them very seriously. Whereas crappy stories from known writers get huge amounts of editorial feedback and help, and are basically treated as "publishable" from the start.
"I was also pretty offended by the fact that (a writer and literary professor's) son, a not-particularly-bright high schooler, was allowed to read and reject stories by people who clearly were doing things (experimenting with form, etc.) he didn't understand. I remember at one point he wrote an R on a story I'd liked, and I called him out about it. 'It's weird,' was his defense, and then, 'You don't have to have reasons for not liking something.' That was not a happy day in my life."
through_triage29 karma
A friend of mine was a reader at the Paris Review. I was wondering about the veracity of some of his statements.
For those interested, below is the dude's account of what it was like interning at the Paris Review.
"OK, so here's the deal with the Paris Review. What this article (ed: I sent the guy an email asking him about it) says is true, kind of. They do have a well-organized system for combing through the slush, and reading the slush is the entire job of the "readers" (usually from the Columbia MFA program) as well as one of the side duties of the interns (unpaid full-time college students who do pretty much everything for the journal besides the actual editing work). It's true that a story has to get two rejections before it's tossed, and if it gets two passes it's read by everyone in the place; it goes in a special basket and there's a sheet attached to the cover where everyone writes their comments. This all gelled with my idealism quite nicely, at first.
"But here's the thing. The Paris Review almost never takes anything from the slush to publish in the magazine. When I worked there, they told me that it had happened once over a year ago, with a story about an autistic piano player, but that it was almost unprecedented. And that seems about right. Invariably the stories that got two passes would go around the office, acquiring comments, sometimes very positive ones... and then they'd disappear and we'd never hear anything about them again. I think those people get personalized rejections from one of the interns or an editor, which is cool, and I'm a lot less put off by it now that I've seen the truly nasty side of publishing through my job. But there is something about the system that's a little bothersome, because even though all this time and energy is being expended on the submissions, everyone in the place knows better than to take them very seriously. Whereas crappy stories from known writers get huge amounts of editorial feedback and help, and are basically treated as "publishable" from the start.
"I was also pretty offended by the fact that (a writer and literary professor's) son, a not-particularly-bright high schooler, was allowed to read and reject stories by people who clearly were doing things (experimenting with form, etc.) he didn't understand. I remember at one point he wrote an R on a story I'd liked, and I called him out about it. 'It's weird,' was his defense, and then, 'You don't have to have reasons for not liking something.' That was not a happy day in my life."
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