The first issue of The Paris Review under its new editor, Lorin Stein, hit newsstands recently, and it’s a thing of sober beauty. The issue doesn’t contain many surprises  there’s fiction from Sam Lipsyte, poetry from Frederick Seidel and work from other usual, if talented, suspects. But it’s a solid and auspicious start, worth having tucked under your arm for that 45-minute wait outside Eataly.

Mr. Stein’s most radical act since taking over from Philip Gourevitch is visible only on the 57-year-old magazine’s crisply redesigned Web site, theparisreview.org. He’s made the entire run of The Paris Review’s storied interview series, previously almost impossible to find in electronic form, available there, free for the browsing. If there’s a better place to lose yourself online right now, I don’t know what it is.

The interviews in The Paris Review  the magazine founded in 1953 by a group of writers and editors that included George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen  are about as canonical, in our literary universe, as spoken words can be. They long ago set the standard, for better and occasionally worse, for what well-brewed conversation should sound like on the page.

These interviews  every issue has one, and sometimes two  are nearly always undertaken in person, by a Paris Review staffer or by a freelance writer. The best of them have always gone a bit off the rails. They’re so tangled, funny and unexpectedly revealing that they could be mounted on Broadway, in the style of “Frost/Nixon.” If you don’t believe me, spend some time with the rambling 1968 interview with a pill-popping Jack Kerouac, who by the end is so whacked-out that he asks his interlocutor, “Why is there a little white beard in your mortality belly?”