On Saturday, November 18, New York University’s Forum on Law, Culture, and Society will host a screening of Barney’s Wall, a seventy-three-minute documentary about Barney Rosset, the provocative and iconoclastic publisher at Grove Press who, in the 1960s, published numerous now-canonical books and helped overturn contemporary censorship laws. Lorin Stein, the editor of The Paris Review, will participate in a conversation after the screening with the film’s director, Sandy Gotham Meehan, writer and editor Alan Kaufman, and New Republiceditor Win McCormack. Tickets are available here. 

In celebration of this event and of Rosset’s legacy, we have unlocked our interview with him for a limited time.  

Barney Rosset, The Art of Publishing, No. 2
Issue no. 145 (Winter 1997)

When I grew up in Chicago, communism was my idea of personal freedom. Especially freedom to make love, right? Actually “free love” was a huge slogan used against the communists. I never heard the communists use it themselves—but it was implicit in communism, because Lenin said sex should be like having a glass of water.