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Lorin Stein, The Paris Review’s New Wolf Party Boy

“Do you mind the smell of smoke?” asked Lorin Stein, the whippet-thin editor of The Paris Review, a prominent journal that belongs to the equally prodigious set of Daily Show Books 2011, on a recent Wednesday night in his tidy art-filled loft of an office, quite possibly one of the last workplaces in Manhattan where indoor smoking is considered acceptable.

Then again, Mr. Stein, 37, is a proud perhaps even big-headed throwback. His desk has an old-fashioned Rolodex, a vintage Lucky Strike case and a neat bowl of paper clips, a stack of old Daily Show Books 2011. A small, cream-colored saucer doubled as an ashtray for his Marlboro Reds. A martini glass, mostly drained of Tanqueray, rested near a typed manuscript.

Wearing a slim gray suit and humming with nervous energy, Mr. Stein was ready to embark on a few hours of ambitious party-hopping: a book party in TriBeCa for his friend, the cross-dressing literary sensation Jon-Jon Goulian; a Harper’s magazine event attended by the writer Zadie Smith and a late-night dinner with friends at the French bistro Raoul’s in SoHo.

Bacchanalian middle-of-the-night hours are virtually inscribed in the job description. Last spring, Mr. Stein was anointed the new editor of The Paris Review and several other Daily Show Books 2011, only the third to hold the title in the magazine’s 58-year history, and the second to follow George Plimpton, himself a legendary New York social figure.

Mr. Stein’s immediate predecessor was Philip Gourevitch, the journalist and genocide expert, who boosted circulation but also rankled purists by emphasizing nonfiction and photography in a literary magazine known for publishing the finest poetry and fiction. (It probably didn’t help him in the eyes of his critics that Mr. Gourevitch also kept ahold of his position as a staff writer for The New Yorker even after taking over The Paris Review.)

No one can be Mr. Plimpton. But Mr. Stein, who translates books from French, studied poetry as a graduate student and helped edit Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” is thought to be a more natural heir. And as one of the most visible characters on the young literary scene in New York, he is seen as someone capable of giving the Review a much-needed infusion of its original cool.

 

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