Susannah Hunnewell, publisher of the Paris Review, died on June 15 at her home in New York. She was 52. Her husband, Antonio Weiss, said the cause was cancer.
Hunnewell began her career with the Paris Review as an editorial assistant in 1989 and, during her first years at the magazine, still then under the leadership of founding editor George Plimpton, she assisted Plimpton in editing The Paris Review Anthology (1990) and the first Writer’s Chapbook (1989). She married Weiss, then the magazine’s associate editor, in 1993.
Hunnewell left the review for a period, working at the New York Times as a news clerk, the American edition of Marie Claire magazine as an editor, and George, the political magazine founded by John F. Kennedy, Jr., as associate editor. During this time, she continued to work with the Review.
In 2000, Hunnewell and her family returned to Paris, where she became the magazine’s Paris editor in 2005. By 2015, they had returned to New York, and Hunnewell was named the seventh publisher of the Review. She named Emily Nemens editor of the Review in 2018 after the resignation of Lorin Stein following accusations of sexual harassment.
A founding board member of the Albertine Bookshop at the French Consulate in New York, Hunnewell was made a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her contributions to literature last November at the Consulate. She is survived by Weiss; three sons, Niccolò, Ottocaro, and Cosimo; and her mother, brother, and sister.
