Welcoming Our New Digital Director, Craig Morgan Teicher

Criag Morgan Teicher [Photo: Spencer Quong]

Attentive readers of the magazine may recognize a new name on our masthead: on May 28, Craig Morgan Teicher joined the staff as our digital director. Craig has been a regular contributor to The Paris Review, with that rare trifecta of bylines in poetry, fiction, and essays, spanning from 2004 to last fall. Meanwhile, he’s had a daytime career at Publisher’s Weekly. Over the last dozen years at that magazine, he’s worn many hats, including director of digital operations and, most recently, director of special editorial projects. We were impressed by his pragmatic and broad set of technical skills, his track record of bolstering digital platforms at organizations much like our own, and his literary acumen. He arrives with a sensibility that manifests as a robust understanding of TPR as a magazine, web presence, and resource, which will be central to any new initiatives we undertake on the site.

We wear a lot of hats here, too. We’re eager for Craig to flex his multifaceted muscles and help guide a great many projects on the web. Stay tuned to this space to see improved site navigation, new features to enhance our sixty-six-year archive, even better newsletters, and a more user-friendly way to get your TPR swag. And the podcast! We’re heading back into the studio—season 2 will be coming this fall.

We asked Craig for a favorite piece from the archive (all of which is digitized and available here), and he replied with a piece from issue no. 215. He writes, “I carry Henri Cole’s books with me everywhere I go, literally—I have all the e-books downloaded on my phone. I feel like he speaks for and out of the dark in my heart, and reaches toward a narrow kind of joy, a pinprick of light, that I’m also drawn to. So I picked this poem, “At the Grave of Robert Lowell,” because, in it, Cole is looking back at another poet who is desperately important to me, complicated for me, as he is for so many others.”

Welcome, Craig!

from The Paris Review http://bit.ly/2QCE2D5

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The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se

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On the Distinctiveness of Writing in China

Yan Lianke at the Salon du Livre, 2010. Photograph by Georges Seguin, via Wikimedia Commons . Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED . When I talk to non-Chinese readers like yourselves, I often find that you are interested in hearing about what distinguishes me as an author but also what distinguishes my country—and particularly details that go beyond what you see on the television, read about in newspapers, and hear about from tourists. I know that China’s international reputation is like that of a young upstart from the countryside who has money but lacks culture, education, and knowledge. Of course, in addition to money, this young upstart also has things like despotism and injustice, while lacking democracy and freedom. The result is like a wild man who is loaded with gold bullion but wears shabby clothing, behaves rudely, stinks of bad breath, and never plays by the rules. If an author must write under the oversight of this sort of individual, how should that author evaluate, discu

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