The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair by George Plimpton

At some point I became a little obsessed with The Paris Review, partly from literary nostalgia, and partly for their great interviews with writers, and began collecting back issues of the magazine.

The Paris Review is what led me to buy this collection of articles by the founding editor of the magazine, George Plimpton, who is also often credited as a pioneer of participatory journalism. This collection was published about a year after Plimpton died, and I get the impression that his earlier work is a bit more dramatic. It's not a bad collection, but the only one that really stuck in my memory is the title essay, about a man who strapped 42 helium balloons to a lawn chair and went for a ride.