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Critic’s Take

Words Unwired

Credit...Jan Buchczik

What’s the point of a literary magazine today? That’s a question I heard a lot five years ago, when my colleagues and I decided to relaunch The Paris Review.

At the time print quarterlies didn’t exactly look like a going concern. The journals we’d grown up on had folded or seemed to be on life support. Every month brought word that another bookstore had closed. Social media was held up as the new literary community, and the Kindle was king. Print, we heard again and again, was dead.

Worse, if you talked to editors, writers and teachers off the record, you encountered a consensus — or at least a prevalent view — that American literature itself was in decline. Short stories especially: Nobody actually wanted to read them. Nobody was learning how to write them. The savviest M.F.A. students were pouring their energies into fat historical novels — and their Facebook pages. When I told my sister I was quitting my job as a book editor to edit a magazine of stories and poems, she looked as if I’d said I was running away to join the circus: a tiny, doomed, irrelevant circus.

Five years later I won’t say all that has changed. But things look slightly different. We spend more time than ever on our devices, but it seems fair to say we like them less, especially when it comes to reading. E-book sales have plateaued. Bookstores have staged a modest resurgence. Turning off your phone has become a prized luxury. Over these last few years all of us, readers and writers alike, have developed a growing appreciation for what the Internet wants to take away: our time alone with the written word.

As the poet Nick Laird recently observed, “the Internet — with its endless choice, its banner ads, its I.M.s and GIFs and Vines — is a disastrous locale” for most poetry. “Does anything less than the immediately shocking or charming get attention? . . . Trying to hear the tonally complex voice of a complicated poem is like trying to hear a moth in a hurricane — and all the time the hurricane is screaming that there are a billion other things you could be doing.”

The same goes for complicated fiction. There is a sound I hear in lots of “literary” stories and novels today, not just the ones that come to me on submission, but published work too. It’s the sound of fingers on a keyboard. When I’m supposed to hear the voice of a narrator, or see a family around a dinner table, what I’m actually aware of is the author pushing a product, specifically, the image of the writer at work, doing his or her best to shock and charm.

Method actors like to talk about something called “public solitude” — that is, the ability to seem alone onstage. Really, to be alone, without wondering how you look to the audience. They will tell you this is the basis of naturalistic acting: to forget about the audience. Only then can you build a character, pay attention to others onstage and act out a scene.

To write a story also requires public solitude. You can’t be worrying how you sound. You can’t wonder whether you or your characters are likable or smart or interesting. You have to be inside the scene — the tactile world of tables and chairs and sunlight — attending to your characters, people who exist for you in nonvirtual reality. This takes weird brain chemistry. (A surprising number of novelists hear voice, and not metaphorically. They hear voice in their heads.) It also takes years of reading — solitary reading.

For all these reasons, writing fiction is pretty much the opposite of writing a good tweet, or curating an Instagram feed. It’s the opposite of the personal-­­­slash-professional writing that is now part of our everyday lives. More than ever, we need writers who are unprofessional, whose private worlds come first. Surely this has something to do with the wild success of immersive, multivolume imports like “My Struggle” and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy.

I think it must have something to do with the small renaissance we’ve seen in American letters. And it has been a renaissance. Five years ago Ben Lerner, ­Atticus Lish and Ottessa Moshfegh had yet to publish any fiction. John Jeremiah Sullivan had yet to publish a book of essays or Rowan Ricardo Phillips a collection of poems. These and dozens of other young writers have found shelter in the Paris Review. What’s more, they’ve found an audience. In the past five years our circulation has nearly doubled. The review has more print readers now than ever in its 62-year history.

The reason seems plain to me. By writing offline, literally and metaphorically, this new generation of writers gives us the intimacy, the assurance of their solitude. They let us read the word “I” and feel that it’s not attached to a product. They let us read an essay, or a stanza, and feel the silence around it — the actual, physical stillness of a body when it’s deep in thought. It can’t be faked, in life or on the page. We see the opposite all around us every day, but to me, that kind of writing matters now more than ever before, — precisely because it’s become so hard to do.

Lorin Stein is the editor of “The Unprofessionals: New American Writing From The Paris Review.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 25 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Words Unwired . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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