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The accomplished writer and new editor of The Paris Review talks to mb's David S. Hirschman about his ambitions for revitalizing George Plimpton's storied literary quarterly.

The Paris Review is a well-known institution with a long and celebrated history. What do you think have been some of its strengths through the years?

I think some of its key strengths, which it has had from the very beginning, are in its tendency to publish writers at every stage of their careers so that they're next to each other, so that you have the first piece of an unknown writer sitting next to an interview with a Nobel prize-winning writer at the very mature end of a very full career. Sometimes both benefit from the juxtaposition; it might be obvious how the first-time writer is pleased to be published next to the grand master, but the grand master stays fresh that way. The two next to each other represent the vitality of writing.

That also reflects a kind of larger quality that the Review has been able to hold onto over the years, which is not to become defined with some particular moment or school or generation, but to stay quite current and in the moment with the changing times. Often literary magazines are attached to a specific time or movement; they belong to this idea as it flourishes, or that critical tendency, and as that ceases to be hot, so does the magazine. That has never been an issue for the Paris Review, because it has always been about literature in a very broad sense.

One of the few policies that the magazine had when it was originally conceived was not to publish critical essays, and that was a specific response to what most literary reviews were at the time. That's where the interview thing came from: the philosophy of the magazine is to have writers talk about writing. The Paris Review in some ways pioneered that format; the very intensive, long-form, detailed profile Q&A, and that—the archive of interviews—is something that is really one of its great strengths. I think many people who may not have actually ever read an issue of The Paris Review as they were growing up will have read Paris Review interviews in anthologies and anthologies, and for many writers over the years—and readers—they have been a crucial part of coming of age as a writer or a reader. That archive is now being put up on the Paris Review's website under the—I think accurate—title "The DNA of Literature." Interestingly, in the early years of the interviews, there were often some really great pairings of interviewer and interviewee. I think of Ralph Ellison where he was interviewing Robert Penn Warren, but it could have easily been the other way around; you want to hear from both of them. Over the years, there have always been writers' notebooks and writers' correspondence, and the "Writers at Work" interviews series has also at times branched out to include other aspects of the literary undertaking.

Those are some of the obvious appeals of it. It has always been a place where you have been able to encounters new writers as well, and read if not first fiction, then early fiction. The first stories of someone who may not have published a book. And it's always had a kind of very interesting balance between taking writing and literature very seriously without that seeming like taking your medicine. There's never any sense of cultural earnestness, and it's always had a really great sense of fun and accessability.

I actually am not that fond of the word literary, which, as far as I can tell, just means written. It's usually meant to denote high writing, but I don't like the idea that it should be seen by some people as forbidding, like it should be seen as esoteric, or for specialists. What I like to think of [the magazine's style] is just that it looks for excellent writing; it's always been known as a writers' magazine, but that should always mean that it is a readers' magazine—since what else do writers want—and also because it always has been.

The magazine has always had a small market—literary intellectuals. Would you want to expand that? Do you think that there is room to make the magazine more mainstream?

I can't imagine being an editor and not wanting more circulation; that's just what you do, you want to get it out there. Of course. But that does not mean that one tries to imagine what readers think they want, and then try to provide that in pursuit of them. My sense is that, the better the magazine, the more readers it will appeal to. Certainly enlarging circulation is a hope and a goal and an ambition, and certainly my feeling is that, if we do it right and more people know what is in there, more people will be reading it. My aim is to make a really, really readable magazine but we're not going to do that by imitating others.

Having worked at The New Yorker, do you see aspects of that magazine that you would like to incorporate into The Paris Review?

The New Yorker does what it does really well and I don't think there's a need for a second New Yorker. I think that there are some things that The Paris Review does differently; it's more of a fiction magazine. As a quarterly, we will not even attempt to cover news. Even as we will introduce nonfiction—not at the expense of fiction but in addition to it, as a complement to it. Nonfiction, where the writing is as much part of the pleasure as the content—where you'd read it even if you didn't have a previous interest in the subject. We will stick to the tradition of no critical essays; we will not start reviewing books or movies, and we will not have cultural trend pieces. Those would totally not belong there and would totally alter the magazine. But reported nonfiction, reportage, descriptive writing—some of it voice-driven. The writers I'm most excited about running, I can't tell you their names because you don't know them and I don't know them—they haven't come along yet. I very much want The Paris Review to be an address where people consider a very exciting place to be seen for the first time, and where we have the opportunity to give people that.

Your background is mainly in nonfiction. Is it a stretch to now be editing fiction and poetry as well?

I've written and published some fiction and I've always read a lot more fiction than nonfiction. The most nonfiction I read is for work—though some is for sheer pleasure of course—but I read a lot of fiction and am really excited to be reading more of it. It's true that I've made my living for the past decade as a writer of reported nonfiction, but it occurred to me the other day so did George Plimpton. And nobody ever said, "Does that disqualify him from publishing fiction?" I think the two can go very well together and aren't at all a contradiction. The traditions of the magazines are like that, and are things I respect.

One of the things the magazine has also always been known for is poetry, and we have right now a lot of poets included in each issue with only one or two poems per poet in a way that they don't stand out enough. I'd like to instead see portfolios of poetry, so that you'd have four or five poets per issue and a number of poems per poet. It should be more excitng for poets, but also for readers, because it's very difficult to form a sense of a poet from just one or two pieces. It's hard to form an attachment from just a couple of poems.

Are you planning to continue contributing to The New Yorker and do other writing projects on the side?

Yeah, I will continue to write, and I will continue to contribute to The New Yorker. Obviously this will limit my productivity, but, over time, I can't imagine not writing. It was understood, in taking the job, that that was one of the things that I do in my life.