Two Kickbutt Issues of The Paris Review: An Interview with Editor Nicole Rudick

“Good ideas come from all sorts of places, and the minute we limit ourselves to only our own tastes, we shut off any number of interesting writers, interesting subjects.”

Ways That Editors Can Tell a Story:
Polyphonic choices
Through juxtaposition
Being adventurous

Sometimes the most interesting people in our literary culture are ones you never hear from, because they work behind the scenes. As an editor and critic, Nicole Rudick has quietly accomplished some very cool, critical things for almost two decades—first at Bookforum, later as managing editor of The Paris Review. So when the departure of PR editor Lorin Stein found Rudick suddenly at the magazine’s helm, and when she proceeded to use this opportunity to put together 2018’s extraordinary Spring and Summer issues, I, a longtime fan, decided to interview her about it. 

We spoke for about an hour in the PR offices in late May of this year. The Summer issue was printed but not yet on newsstands. If we didn’t talk much about the circumstances of Lorin Stein’s departure, or the future of the magazine and Nicole’s own resignation, it’s not because those things aren’t worth talking about, but because my focus was on Nicole’s work at the Review and the two issues she’s edited: the thinking behind them, and the vision of literature they represent.

—Martin Riker

I. An Education

THE BELIEVER: In my personal history of you, you first appear in the offices of Bookforum, sometime in the aughts, where I couldn’t help but notice your interest in marginalized and experimental writers nobody else would give the time of day. But I have to assume you had a life before that. Were you a book kid? Were you an art kid?

NICOLE RUDICK: I grew up in Denton, TX, just north of Dallas-Fort Worth. It’s a college town with a strong arts presence, but it still had a small-town feel. My parents were both college professors, both cell biologists, but they are big readers outside of the sciences. There were always lots of books in the house. My grandmother was an Anglophile—she visited England every year and would bring me back programs and posters from the museums and galleries there. And my mother’s office was across the street from the museums in Fort Worth. I went to the Kimbell a lot as a kid—it was my favorite museum growing up and is still one of my favorite small museums. I remember seeing the Barnes Collection there, and a show of Jain art from India.

BLVR: What kinds of stuff did you read?

NR: I grew up riding horses, and was generally horse-obsessed, so I read every...