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By Root 1252 0

George likes to pretend we’re some kind of global institution—he’s always adding people he meets to the masthead with grand titles like “Moscow editor” or “Special ambassador to the Southern Hemisphere”—but the magazine is tiny and parochial, even a bit homely. (For decades its business manager was a lovable old grandmother named Nicky who worked out of her attic in Flushing and never came into the office. Although she was only a few miles away, many people who worked for George had never met Nicky in person and only knew her by her Queens-inflected warble.) Nestled in the shadows of Manhattan’s media titans—the Condé Nasts, the Times Companys—it’s an amateur among professionals.

But being small can be a virtue: in the case of a deli, smallness means that the person who’s poured your coffee for the last twenty years and whose children you’ve put through college is likely the owner, not some faceless corporation in an office park with square bushes in Odessa, Texas. In the case of the Review, smallness means that George has the freedom to make unconventional, ad hoc, interesting business and editorial decisions, things that a larger and stiffer, more bottom-line-oriented institution wouldn’t allow.

Such as the slush, for instance, that morass of unsolicited manuscripts sent in by the masses trying out to be the next Jeffrey Eugenides or Ann Patchett (both slush discoveries). Like a lot of the magazines considered its peers, the Review can afford to rely on literary agents and published writers to provide its material. Unlike larger places, however, it chooses to concentrate a major part of its office resources on the slush. This comes at considerable inconvenience. We receive something like thirty thousand manuscripts a year, an amount so massive one of the biggest challenges is simply finding space for it. One of the quintessential Paris Review experiences is opening a cupboard to look for a coffee mug and having an avalanche of short fiction land on top of you. You open a closet meant for coats and there’s a stack of cardboard boxes containing unsolicited manuscripts. You sit down at your desk and stretch out your legs, and bump—there’s a whole milk crate of human creativity. There’s slush on the shelves in piles reaching up to the ceiling, slush in the basement in ice coolers and picnic baskets, slush under the toilet, slush over the sink, slush spilling into a rat-filled tunnel that extends from the basement of George’s building all the way up to East Ninety-sixth Street. There’s so much slush it makes you wonder if everyone in the country, instead of watching reality TV and playing video games, is writing short stories. But George insists that we read every submission, because nothing in the world gives him greater pleasure than the Discovery, that once- or twice-per-year moment when you unearth a new talent laboring in the shadows. When it happens, our office is literally filled with joy.

Being small also creates problems, however: just because you don’t have a marketing director doesn’t mean you don’t need one; ditto subscription fulfillment, fund-raising, a permissions department, etc., all of which George doles out to the staff (who are generally as unqualified for such jobs as you would think) on top of their editorial duties. It’s do-it-yourself publishing, and a lot of the time, given the late-boarding-school atmosphere of the magazine, it doesn’t get done.

Lately, some worrying signs have begun to appear. The Review has always had an untidy, overcrowded office that more resembled the headquarters of a high school yearbook than a real-world magazine. Six editors share a converted studio apartment so tiny that as they sit there reading manuscripts all day, they can practically communicate without talking. (“Is that your stomach growling or mine?”) In recent months, however, the slush has begun to reach unprecedented heights, overwhelming all efforts at control. It’s like a mutant lab creature run amok, or an invasive weed colonizing a hapless little pond. Poetry alone—my God, the world produces a lot of poems