While many people live around the world and draw their paychecks from New York -- still the nation's financial capital -- Park lives the reverse: His day job is with the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, which he visits several times a month. The Believer, which he co-edits, is based in San Francisco.
A literary celebrity in an old-school way, Gessen is well enough known in the New York media world -- he broke into the New York Review of Books while still in his 20s -- that his novel went through the entire cycle of hype and backlash before publication. The media blog Gawker has been rather unhealthily obsessed with him and his co-conspirator, novelist Benjamin Kunkel, describing Gessen as having "the soulful looks of a Greenwich Village bohemian and the oh-so-erotic arrogance of a Russian-Jewish intellectual." The site chronicles his love life as though he were George Clooney, not a largely untested writer who spends most of his days hunched over a computer.
Inside the literary media swirl these days, the books can seem beside the point. Does literature retain any of that old prestige? Rich, for his part, takes a pragmatic approach.
"I think there are more people engaged with literature than there ever have been," he said. "When people think about the golden age of the novel in the 19th century, literacy rates were absurdly low. There wasn't electricity to read by: People weren't just sitting around reading all day then either."
Rich may be living a charmed life in a sense: Despite some post-college drift, he managed to intern at the New York Review of Books, live in San Francisco and write a book on the city's noir cinema, all before his 25th birthday. His time at the Paris Review, which he joined in June 2005, has coincided with a renaissance of the quarterly under editor Philip Gourevitch, with circulation now at 16,000, exceeding its early '60s apogee. He's come by his optimism honestly.
Is it becoming more difficult, with the incredible cost of living, to live the life of the mind? "I don't really know what it means to live the life of the mind," Rich said."It's becoming a lot more difficult to live in Manhattan. The things that were great about New York are still here, they're just in different places."
Finding his own voice
