Longreads Best of 2013: The Best Story About Storytelling

## In Conversation: Robert Silvers

## 对话中：罗伯特·西尔弗斯

Mark Danner | New York magazine | April 2013 | 28 minutes (7,063 words)

马克·丹纳 |纽约杂志 | 2013 年 4 月 | 28 分钟（7,063 字）

Nicholas Jackson is the digital director at Pacific Standard, and a former digital editor at Outside and The Atlantic.

尼古拉斯·杰克逊 (Nicholas Jackson) 是 Pacific Standard 的数字总监，也是 Outside 和 The Atlantic 的前数字编辑。

These year-end lists tend to be like the Academy Awards in that only work released during the last couple of months of the year are remembered well enough to make the cut.

这些年终名单往往类似于奥斯卡金像奖，因为只有在一年的最后几个月发布的作品才能被人们记住并入选。

That’s a good thing.

这是一件好事。

Sure, I’d like to recall every great quotation I read in 2013, every delightful turn of phrase.

当然，我想回忆一下 2013 年读到的每一句精彩的名言，每一个令人愉快的措辞。

But it’s better that I can’t.

但最好我不能。

It means, like movies, that there’s more work I would consider worthy of my time being produced than I could possibly make time for, and plenty that I did make the time for that’s already been displaced in my mind by just the latest of the hundreds of stories I read this year.

这意味着，就像电影一样，我认为值得我花时间制作的作品比我可能抽出的时间要多，而且我确实花时间制作的很多作品已经被我今年读到的数百个故事中的最新一个所取代。

So, I cheated.

所以，我作弊了。

I went back through some archives to jog my memory and pulled up this comprehensive interview with Bob Silvers to mark the 50th anniversary of The New York Review of Books.

为了纪念《纽约书评》问世 50 周年，我翻阅了一些档案以唤起记忆，并调出这篇对鲍勃·西尔弗斯的全面采访。

Silvers has had his hands on several big pieces this past year (must-read stories by Zadie Smith and Nathaniel Rich; something about the favelas of Brazil; I vaguely recall an Oliver Sacks essay on, of course, memory), but ask any editor and I bet most would tell you that he’s influenced every piece on these round-ups …

去年，西尔弗斯写了几篇大文章（扎迪·史密斯和纳撒尼尔·里奇的必读故事；一些关于巴西贫民窟的故事；我依稀记得奥利弗·萨克斯的一篇文章，当然，是关于记忆的），但如果问任何一个编辑，我敢打赌大多数人都会告诉你，他影响了这些综述中的每一篇文章……

and any others you’ve read over the past five decades.

以及您在过去五年中读过的任何其他书籍。

This is a story about stories: How we make them, and why.

这是一个关于故事的故事：我们如何制作它们，以及为什么。

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

照片：维基共享资源