Words by Chris Wallace
Photography By Justin Chung

Lorin Stein, The Paris Review

New York, NY

As a child growing up in Washington D.C., Lorin Stein wanted only to read. “I was always being told to do something, to go outside, to go play, to learn how to ride a bike,” he says now, leaning back in his chair, “and all I wanted to do was spend time with my books.”
The last of the blue summer twilight fills the airy, book-lined offices of The Paris Review, where Stein has been the editor since 2010. It is the close of a business day and he has poured a whiskey over rocks and lighted a cigarette. “If you’d told me then that this was an option, editing a literary magazine, I would have been very happy to have that as a goal.” One goal reached and still he has to protect his reading time—from the regular encroachment of administrative duties, from social obligations, and, what’s worst, from the nagging distractions of the phone. “The truth is that going out is not the main time suck,” he says. “It is compulsively checking your email, texting, and reading in this provisional way—that’s what I don’t like. ●

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Full story available in Faculty Department Vol. 1.

Photographed in 2014 – New York, NY.

Ido Yoshimoto

Inverness, CA

Molly Sedlacek

Fairfax, CA