The Paris Review 173

From Chicago to Chisinau—Aleksandar Hemon on the trail of an “How did his hope so quickly turn to disappointment? How did the Land of the Free kill him, at the age of nineteen, months after he had arrived? This is what I wanted to write about.” “Psychic castration”—Les Murray looks back on his school “When American students asked me many years later what I thought about the Columbine massacre, I horrified them by saying, ëWeíre shooting back now.í” Short fiction by A. S. Byatt and Jack “The children made chase, but the dog was too fast for them, cutting a jagged path through several of the older girls and boys who tried to intercept it at the corner. Zheng waited with Chen Wei, still gripping his butcher knife with two hands.” The Paris Review is a quarterly literary magazine established in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. Plimpton edited the Review from its founding until his death in 2003. In its first five years, The Paris Review published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet and Robert Bly. It has since become one of the world's leading outlets for emerging and established writers. Lorin Stein is the current editor. The Review's highly regarded "Writers at Work" series includes interviews with Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Irwin Shaw, Elizabeth Bishop, and Vladimir Nabokov, among many others. The series has been called "one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world."