From Publishers Weekly
In his introduction to this rewarding anthology, critically acclaimed author Powers (Galatea 2.2; Plowing the Dark; etc.) says that reading is the "last refuge from the real-time epidemic." To that end, the selections gathered here are grouped by how long they offer escape from real time: waiting rooms need long stories, for example, while elevators demand poems. Roth, Munro and Naipaul are among the 46 big-name contributors. In the Planes section, Junot Diaz's "Edison, New Jersey" riffs on the love lives of two pool table installers. In T. Coraghessan Boyle's "Greasy Lake" (Trains), three "bad" 19-year-olds ("We read André Gide and struck elaborate poses to show we didn't give a shit about anything") looking for trouble cruising in the narrator's mother's Bel Air find it at the eponymous lake. In Elevators, Deborah Warren's poem "Airplane" strikes a timely, nervous note: "Now, as you board the airplane, is there latent/ in its thorax-nestled near the spine-/ some wiring awry, a hose not tightened?/ Embolisms inching up the fuel line?" And among the longer stories in the Waiting Rooms section is one of Rick Moody's best, "Mansion on the Hill," which follows Andrew Wakefield from the job of shilling drumsticks in a chicken costume to packaging the middle-class sublime in the wedding planning business. While many of these stories will be familiar to well-read fans of literary fiction, the collection proves again the strengths of the Paris Review-what other small magazine could so casually present such literary gold from merely sifting through its back issues? Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Book Description
From “the biggest little magazine in the world” comes an addictively clever anthology prescribed to fill all the blank moments of your life.
The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms is the ultimate, and perfect, theme-anthology. It's theme is the reader. Everyday we must live through moments of waiting--to get from one place to the next, from one appointment to another, for something to happen. This ingeniously useful compendium offers reading material to fill those gray moments with beauty, wonder, insight, and emotion. Organized by the time that the reader has available at that moment, the anthology provides a poem for that elevator ride to the lawyer's office; a short story for the thirty-minute commute; a novella for the three-hour plane ride. As ever, The Paris Review provides work from only the best writers of the last three generations.
Among those to appear:
- Mary Robison
- Denis Johnson
- Michael Chabon
- Marilyn Hacker
- Robert Pinsky
- and many more.
About the Author
The Paris Review since 1953, has published the work of Gabriel García Márquez, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Jonathan Lethem, Italo Calvino, and others. They celebrated their fiftieth anniversary last year with the publication of The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, The Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953.
The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms, Vol. 1 FROM THE PUBLISHER
The Paris Review Book For Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms relieves the age-old nuisance called waiting. Waiting to get from A to B. For your name to be called in the nephrologist's office. For the elevator to arrive, the plane to land, the subway to move. This anthology, arranged by length of entry, collects some of the finest work published in The Paris Review since 1953. Where once you were passed out at the DMV, you now have a novella by Rick Moody. Likewise for the endless commute, a short story by Philip Roth. There's even something to enliven that long lift to the penthouse: poems by Jamaica Kincaid as you ascend. Whatever the wait. with this new collection you're ready to enjoy it.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
In his introduction to this rewarding anthology, critically acclaimed author Powers (Galatea 2.2; Plowing the Dark; etc.) says that reading is the "last refuge from the real-time epidemic." To that end, the selections gathered here are grouped by how long they offer escape from real time: waiting rooms need long stories, for example, while elevators demand poems. Roth, Munro and Naipaul are among the 46 big-name contributors. In the Planes section, Junot Diaz's "Edison, New Jersey" riffs on the love lives of two pool table installers. In T. Coraghessan Boyle's "Greasy Lake" (Trains), three "bad" 19-year-olds ("We read Andre Gide and struck elaborate poses to show we didn't give a shit about anything") looking for trouble cruising in the narrator's mother's Bel Air find it at the eponymous lake. In Elevators, Deborah Warren's poem "Airplane" strikes a timely, nervous note: "Now, as you board the airplane, is there latent/ in its thorax-nestled near the spine-/ some wiring awry, a hose not tightened?/ Embolisms inching up the fuel line?" And among the longer stories in the Waiting Rooms section is one of Rick Moody's best, "Mansion on the Hill," which follows Andrew Wakefield from the job of shilling drumsticks in a chicken costume to packaging the middle-class sublime in the wedding planning business. While many of these stories will be familiar to well-read fans of literary fiction, the collection proves again the strengths of the Paris Review-what other small magazine could so casually present such literary gold from merely sifting through its back issues? (July 1) Forecast: Issued only a year after The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953 (Picador), this new volume may find itself competing with the former collection-it already loses out on title length. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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