Last evening, the cozy Tribeca offices of The Paris Review were packed in celebration of the magazine's Fall issue, which features a photo dossier of the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and an interview with the Israeli author David Grossman, who is working on his first novel in several years. New Yorker fact-checker Jonathan Shainin, who conducted the interview in and around Grossman's home outside Jerusalem, told Media Mob that he interviewed Grossman over the course of several days, resulting in around nine hours of tape. "Mercifully, Paris Review interns typed it," Mr. Shainin said. "It was a 50,000 word transcript! I definitely had my favorite bits that didn't make it in to the final version," which is around 11,000 words. Well, novelists are wordy!

Paris Review has a long tradition of throwing open its office parties to the greater literary community of New York, a tradition begun by the magazine's late founder George Plimpton, when the magazine was based in his Upper East Side townhouse. When the current editor-in-chief, New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch, moved the magazine downtown after becoming editor in 2005, the tradition of the parties continued. And thus, at times it seemed that every editorial assistant in town (or at least, those at the better publishing houses) was there, swilling from the open bar and dipping their hands into the potato chips.  read more »

--Gabriel Sherman