Product 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 Roomsis 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 Reviewprovides 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1423355 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-15
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .77" h x 5.52" w x 8.22" l, .80 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

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?
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About the Author

The Paris Reviewsince 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.