After Plimpton, Onward & Upward

"How many I killed is not important," he says. "I count to 17 and then stop counting. It's just a number."

The magazine's current issue -- Gourevitch's fifth -- is fairly typical. It contains poems by Billy Collins and Mary Karr, short stories by Mohsin Hamid and Gyorgy Dragoman, a gallery of color photos from a Cambodian swimming hole, excerpts from Robert Frost's notebooks and an excellent interview with Stephen King.

There's also a bizarre collection of cartoons, recently found in a Communist Party archive in Moscow, drawn by those wild, wacky guys who composed Stalin's inner circle in the 1930s. One of them, created by a member of the Politburo, shows Nikolai Bryukhanov, the people's commissar of finances, being hung by his privates. When this charming artwork was passed to Stalin, he wrote a comment on it: "For all the sins, past and present, hang Bryukhanov by the [gonads]. If the [gonads] hold out, consider him acquitted by trial. If they do not hold, drown him in the river."

Ah, good ol' Uncle Joe Stalin! What a cutup!

This issue also contains what Gourevitch calls "the Paris Review's first scoop." It's an interview with Laura Albert, who was recently unmasked as author of the much-praised novels and short stories written under the name JT LeRoy, who was said to be a former teenage junkie and transvestite truck-stop prostitute but who was actually a figment of Albert's fertile imagination.

The San Francisco Chronicle called the LeRoy affair "the greatest literary hoax in a generation." But this fascinating interview reveals that the real story was far more complex and interesting.

As Albert tells the tale, she began creating fictitious characters as an unhappy teenager in New York, calling youth hotlines and pretending to be various troubled kids, some Southern, some Irish. Then she became a phone sex operator, a job that allowed her to indulge her love of fantasy. After moving to San Francisco in 1989, she says, she began a series of phone calls with a sympathetic psychiatrist, pretending to be a 13-year-old street kid named Jeremiah LeRoy and spinning elaborate stories of drugs, abuse and prostitution.

"I never thought, My God, this isn't true," Albert says. "It felt more alive and more true to me than any of the things in my world."

The psychiatrist asked "Jeremiah" to write down his stories, and Albert did. Raw and compelling, they were ultimately published as the work of JT LeRoy, who became a cult figure with a following that included Madonna, Lou Reed and Drew Barrymore.

At least that's what Albert says happened. Who knows? She is, by her own account, a master liar and could be making all this up. Either way, though, it's an amazing story, probably as good as anything written by "JT LeRoy."

In the last three years, the Paris Review's circulation has risen from under 5,000 to more than 13,000, Gourevitch says, and, thanks to various donors, it's on a solid financial foundation.

Gourevitch has proven himself a splendid successor to Plimpton as editor of the review. But that doesn't mean he's planning to attempt any of Plimpton's more colorful adventures.

"Fortunately," he says, "getting shot out of a cannon is not in the job description."