The Unprofessionals New American Writing from The Paris Review

"A dispatch from the front lines of literature."
-The Atlantic

"A new generation of writers is not only keeping American literature alive but restoring the excitement of it - pushing it forward, rediscovering and rethinking the world we live in - and the Paris Review, despite its age and pedigree, is at the forefront of the renaissance."
-Jonathan Franzen

This book is electric. I got to encounter voices I already loved and fall in love with writers I d never read, got to realize this would be the day I d always remember as the day I read them first.
-Leslie Jamison

"Lesser-known writers manage startling feats in the array of stories, poems, and nonfiction pieces collected in this anthology. But don t be surprised or disappointed to encounter the work of very successful pros, too, from Zadie Smith and Ben Lerner to Dan Chiasson and John Jeremiah Sullivan."
- The Atlantic

"In presenting writing like this, The Paris Review has fashioned a valuable correction to the prevailing notion that a writer's success can only be gauged by megabucks contracts, media attention, and multiple printings."
- Elle

"Like a beautifully unified concept album...The Unprofessionals lulls readers away from the conventional and everyday with its limpid prose and toward the edge of some psychological abyss."
-Sam Sacks, The New Republic

"Good writers are always beginners, unprofessionals, driven by desire: ears open, vision wiped clean. They find their home in The Paris Review."
- Hilary Mantel
 
"The best possible introduction to the best literary magazine we have."
-Akhil Sharma

"There s a searing reality present in the collection that feels wholly different from the kind of writing we all consume on a daily basis...In the absence of morality and self-consciousness, the collection almost shakes its way off the page, so buzzing is it with life and shame and voice."
- Kirkus