My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe Page A

afterward.
    “I think we get the picture,” one of the editors says after George starts going down his usual path.
    “Good, good,” says George. “Excellent. Because what I’m trying to say is that you mustn’t take anything for granted. The cornerstones of reality shift overnight, and things are forever different. Life makes sudden turns without warning, do you hear?”
    He looks around the room, to see if we’re all listening.
    “Very well, that’s all I’m going to say. Now, has anyone seen Page Six today? I hear there’s an item …”
    At this moment I realize that in a funny way, the
Paris Review
is like a deli: it’s a throwback, an institution that doesn’t quite fit in the modern world. It’s not big or corporate. It doesn’t have a lot ofswagger or muscle. There’s no marketing director, IT manager or human resources department. George likes to pretend we’re some kind of global institution—he’s always adding people he meets to the masthead with grand titles like “Moscow editor” or “Special ambassador to the Southern Hemisphere”—but the magazine is tiny and parochial, even a bit homely. (For decades its business manager was a lovable old grandmother named Nicky who worked out of her attic in Flushing and never came into the office. Although she was only a few miles away, many people who worked for George had never met Nicky in person and only knew her by her Queens-inflected warble.) Nestled in the shadows of Manhattan’s media titans—the Condé Nasts, the Times Companys—it’s an amateur among professionals.
    But being small can be a virtue: in the case of a deli, smallness means that the person who’s poured your coffee for the last twenty years and whose children you’ve put through college is likely the owner, not some faceless corporation in an office park with square bushes in Odessa, Texas. In the case of the
Review
, smallness means that George has the freedom to make unconventional, ad hoc,
interesting
business and editorial decisions, things that a larger and stiffer, more bottom-line-oriented institution wouldn’t allow.
    Such as the slush, for instance, that morass of unsolicited manuscripts sent in by the masses trying out to be the next Jeffrey Eugenides or Ann Patchett (both slush discoveries). Like a lot of the magazines considered its peers, the
Review
can afford to rely on literary agents and published writers to provide its material. Unlike larger places, however, it chooses to concentrate a major part of its office resources on the slush. This comes at considerable inconvenience. We receive something like thirty thousand manuscripts a year, an amount so massive one of the biggest challenges is simply finding space for it. One of the quintessential
Paris Review
experiences is opening a cupboard to look for a coffee mug and having anavalanche of short fiction land on top of you. You open a closet meant for coats and there’s a stack of cardboard boxes containing unsolicited manuscripts. You sit down at your desk and stretch out your legs, and bump—there’s a whole milk crate of human creativity. There’s slush on the shelves in piles reaching up to the ceiling, slush in the basement in ice coolers and picnic baskets, slush under the toilet, slush over the sink, slush spilling into a rat-filled tunnel that extends from the basement of George’s building all the way up to East Ninety-sixth Street. There’s so much slush it makes you wonder if everyone in the country, instead of watching reality TV and playing video games, is writing short stories. But George insists that we read every submission, because nothing in the world gives him greater pleasure than the Discovery, that once- or twice-per-year moment when you unearth a new talent laboring in the shadows. When it happens, our office is literally filled with joy.
    Being small also creates problems, however: just because you don’t have a marketing director doesn’t mean you don’t need one; ditto