By Jacques Testard

Lorin Stein

Lorin Stein is a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York City. He has edited, amongst other works, The Savage Detectives and 2666 (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008) by Roberto Bolaño, and Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 2007. Three of the five books that were nominated that year in fiction were edited by Stein, which is all the more impressive because he is primarily a non-fiction editor. He has also translated two novels from French, and has written for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and The Paris Review, for which he conducted the Jonathan Lethem Art of Fiction interview in 2003. He has just been named as the new editor of The Paris Review.

- Just to get us started, how did you get to be an editor?

In my twenties I moved to New York to become a novelist. My plan was to support myself by writing book reviews. In fact I got a secretarial job at Publishers Weekly.Publishers Weekly ran tiny capsule reviews of maybe fifty books each week. I began to edit and write the fiction reviews. After several thousand of these, it grew clear to me that I wanted to be a book editor, that I wanted to work at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and no other house, and that I was willing to sit and wait till an opening came along. (I never wrote a page of any novel.)

- What do you look for in a book, as an editor? Is it just about it selling, or do you have to feel excited about something the author is doing or saying?

We’re not much good at selling books we don’t love, unfortunately. So yes, you have to be excited. At the same time, you need some idea of what you can do for the book. If you read a book and immediately want to recommend it to certain people, that’s a good sign.

- You have written for a number of reviews for publications such as Harper’s and the New York Review of Books. You’ve also translated a novel-memoir by Grégoire Bouiller from the French, you’re working on another French novel by a young author named Tristan Garcia, and you’ve conducted various interviews including Jonathan Lethem for The Paris Review’s Art of Fiction in 2003. Do these different occupations (editor of fiction and non-fiction, critic, translator, journalist) complement each other? I guess what I mean is which do you consider your true calling?

My favorite job ever was working after school in a second-hand bookstore. I do enjoy editing very much, though. I find it easier than translating–and much easier than writing things from scratch.

- There also seems to be a distinct foreign streak in your work as a whole: you’ve edited Bolaño, you’ve written about Maupassant, translated two novels from French, and I recently read that you were going to publish Sorokin in English. Are you bored of what’s coming out of the English-speaking world? Or are you merely trying to open up the US to the wealth of world literature out there?

It’s not a matter of boredom, or any wish to change US reading habits. They’re just authors I came across and loved.

- On that note, who’s really mattered of late, and who or what should we be looking out for?

Readers might want to look out for Sam Lipsyte. We are about to publish his third novel,The Ask, and I suspect it will make him famous in the States. He is an under-acknowledged leader of what he has described as the “what-the-fuck-do-we-do-know school” of American fiction. So far he lacks an English publisher, but you can find a lot of his work online.

- In terms of form, do you think that the novel has just about run its course and gone down every possible avenue? I would argue that someone like Bolaño has, on the contrary, revitalised the novel and given it a new impetus. How do you feel about this?

You never know what historical forces are at work till after the fact. None of us would have predicted Bolano. None of us would have predicted Joyce or Hemingway, either. Only after they happen to do they seem ‘of their period.’ I don’t worry about the novel exhausting itself. I do worry about people not reading novels and forgetting how to write them.

- A quick word on Bolaño: you edited The Savage Detectives and 2666. Will you be editing Los Sinsabores del Verdadero Policia (see footnote 1 below) ?

[We don't know yet!]

- Are there any ‘obscure’ authors out there that you would particularly recommend? Also, seeing as this is for a UK-based blog, are there any UK authors that you’re excited about?

I thought Wolf Hall was formally a very exciting book–but I don’t suppose that’s obscure. For some reason no other UK novel has knocked my socks off lately. That said, my friend Mitzi Angel, who is English, just translated a novella, entitled 03, by the extremely obscure French writer Jean-Christophe Valtat.

So that answers about half your question. 03 is about a teenager who falls in love with a girl he sees every morning on his way to school. Nothing else happens in the book.

The first sentence: “From the bus stop across the street it was hard to tell, but suddenly I understood, seeing the passengers in the van that collected her every morning, that she was slightly retarded.”

It’s magic. Again, no UK publisher yet. One of your readers should rectify the situation.

- Finally, what advice do you have to dish out to the younger generation of editors and publishers? There seem to be too many people for very few positions; a distinct fear within the wider publishing business about the future; no coherent business model has yet emerged out of the new media revolution. What should we be doing to contribute?

It is much harder now to get a good entry-level job than it was ten years ago, and even harder to advance in a good publishing house. That said, there is a great need for sophisticated, driven, bookish, innovative publicists. They are the ones who will save the serious literary houses, if anyone can–they are the brains. And my sense is that it’s easier to make one’s way as a junior publicist than as an editorial assistant.

1. Los sinsabores del verdadero policia has been billed as another major work by the Chilean author which rehashes many of the themes and characters of 2666. It explores Amalfitano’s life before his move to Mexico; it follows the adventures of a French author named JMG Arcimboldi; finally it approaches the Santa Teresa murders from the point of view of the killers. It is forthcoming with Anagrama in Spain. For more on this, see: http://algundiaenalgunaparte.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/bolanomania-xvii-los-sinsabores-del-verdadero-policia/