As an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Lorin Stein brought about masterpieces from Jonathan Franzen and Denis Johnson, and helped introduce the English-speaking world to Roberto Bolaño. Since taking over the top chair at The Paris Review in April 2010, he has tastefully refurbished the house that Plimpton built and brought some much-needed glitz back to the literary world. On a recent evening at his TriBeCa office, martini and Marlboro in hard, Stein gave us some instruction on nostalgia, heroes and the importance of style.  

That picture you have of Frank O’Hara—on the phone, in a button-down oxford shirt with his sleeves rolled up—that is all the glamour of New York, of being a writer. I’m trying to start a campaign to make the literati glamorous again. Will you be our pied piper?
He’s our pied piper. “If you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you.” —that’s O’Hara on the art of poetry. I don’t worry so much about how people dress, but, in general, it’s always fun when people take style seriously. In prose—though it sounds crazy—we have a technological problem that started with the word processor: you don’t have to retype your copy. A lot of the impulsiveness that we like about 50s and 60s writers—whether it is O’Hara or Kerouac or Terry Southern—only works within the technological constraint of the typewriter.

We think of those guys as being so dashed-off, but can you imagine Kerouac as a blogger?
Absolutely not. The behavior looks superficially similar, but the commitment to the sentence… I don’t know if you’ve written on a typewriter recently—you have to think the sentence out before you start to write. Now we make the sentence up as we go along.

Is your dad a stylish chap?
Very, but he’s no dandy. For casual wear, he favors cowboy shirts. He’s got a big mustache. I never really rocked that look. On the other hand, he taught me the value of going undercover at the office. When I was a kid—this was in Washington, D.C.—I thought his seersucker suit was made of the striped paper, the perforated stuff, they used in computer printers. As if one could use office supplies to cover one’s nakedness. My dad gave me the idea that you can wear clothes to become invisible on your own terms.

Who else inspires your aesthetic choices?
In this job there is one great inspiration that comes built-in: George Plimpton. Tom Wolfe called George and his friends the Imitation Generation, because they’d gone to live in a city that didn’t exist anymore—Paris of the 20s—to do what people did in Paris during the 20s. And it turned out to be a very useful fiction. George and Co. pretended their way into a great magazine. But then, George had an incredible nose. Within a few years he was publishing the first works of Jack Kerouac and Philip Roth. Over the decades, under George, the Review discovered Mona Simpson, Jeff Eugenides, David Foster Wallace, the list goes on.

Sam Lipsyte has said that you have impeccable taste. In this job it is your profession to have great taste. How do you know when something is right—a sentence, a suit…?
Desire. You want it. It answers to something in you. In literature that usually means reading some truth you didn’t know could be said, especially if it has to do with moral problems in your own life. The same way you see a beautiful piece of clothing—a suit, a coat, whatever—and you think, that is a piece of myself that doesn’t belong to me, and wonder, could it be mine too? But editors don’t discover things the way you discover a $5 bill under a sofa cushion, or a good shirt. You discover in the sense of uncovering, of promoting, new work with—you hope—a certain authority; you assert the importance of something you love. I suppose this is a matter of style.

Who teaches you about style?
With writing, I think you learn by reading and paying attention to how it makes you feel. With clothes—well, beyond knotting a tie and being inconspicuous, what little I know about clothes I’ve learned mainly from women. Women understand men’s clothes so much better than we understand theirs. I was sent to Kirk Miller—who makes my suits and shirts—by my friend Rita Konig, who looked me up and down, before my Paris Review job interview, actually, and said, “You need someone who does what you do, but with clothes.” I have no clue what she meant, though maybe Kirk and I are both a little bit excitable, a tiny bit wild-eyed. In any case it’s flattering to me. I put myself in his hands.

So now do you get everything made at Miller’s Oath?
No, no. I wear lots of corduroys. Corduroys and desert boots. I’m a hopelessly rumpled person. And I’m cheap. Most of my ties I’ve had since college.

So, wait, you’re only 38? What are you going to be when you grow up?
Oh gosh. I don’t want to grow up. I really enjoy being a kid, now that I’m old. When I was young I was always being told to do stuff: Go outside and play; Go make friends; Learn how to ride a bike. And what I really wanted to do was read.

Who is in your style pantheon?
Among the living, there’s Frederick Seidel—our former Paris editor, and a great friend—who once called me four times to advise me on buying, yes, a seersucker suit. In his poems Fred celebrates the tailor Richard Anderson, the jeweler Joel Rosenthal, surgeons, motorcycle designers, judges—style, wherever he finds it. As he told his Paris Review interviewer, “I like to hear the sound of form, and I like to hear the sound of it breaking.” I love that. Among the dead, there is always Baudelaire. Baudelaire made very explicit the connection between style in writing and dressing. He introduced the word “dandy” into French. His hero was Beau Brummel, the inventor of modern tailoring. Brummel’s idea was that clothes should never look anything but comfortable—naturalness through artifice. Of course, that doesn’t come cheap. Baudelaire, in his poverty, was known for wearing cardboard in his shoes but having brilliantly clean shirts. He paid his laundry bill. 

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