The Paris Review, Issue 185, Summer 2008

An interview with Umberto Eco: “I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn't like to watch television. I'm just the only one who confesses.”Six new poems by master poet Charles Wright: “I'm winding down. The daylight is winding down. / Only the night is wound up tight.”Chinese dissident writer Liao Yiwu visits the epicenter of the Sichuan earthquake.A dispatch from a New Mexico fire lookout: “A new smoke often looks beautiful: a wisp of white like a feather, a single snag puffing little fingers of smoke in the air.”New fiction from Karl Taro Greenfeld, Alistair Morgan, and Glen Pourciau. New poetry from Katy Lederer and Matthew Zapruder.Plus seventy years of complaint letters sent to the mayor of New York, photographs by Vijay Balakrishnan, and Paula Fox's memories of an unusual friendship.