Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Iris Murdoch.

A couple of weeks ago, the Redux brought you April showers; now we’re delivering the obligatory May flowers. Read on for Iris Murdoch’s Art of Fiction interview, Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Funes the Memorious,” and Eileen Myles’s poem “Circus.”

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Iris Murdoch, The Art of Fiction No. 117
Issue no. 115 (Summer 1990)

INTERVIEWER

Which tends to come first—characters or plot?

MURDOCH

I think they all start in much the same way, with two or three people in a relationship with a problem. Then there is a story, ordeals, conflicts, a movement from illusion to reality, all that. I don’t think I have any autobiographical tendencies and can’t think of any novel I’ve written that is a copy of my own life.

Funes the Memorious
By Jorge Luis Borges
Issue no. 28 (Summer–Fall 1962)

I remember him (I have no right to utter this sacred verb, only one man on earth had that right and he is dead) with a dark passion flower in his hand, seeing it as no one has ever seen it, though he might look at it from the twilight of dawn till that of evening, a whole lifetime.

Circus
By Eileen Myles
Issue no. 214 (Fall 2015)

Jill tells me about the
show she is making
& I thought it’s like
Flowers. What kind
of flowers am I making.
I think that I met
you at work. I’m home
Now & think what
Kind of flower am
I making. How do we find
the flower, use the
Flower spread it around
I thought summer’s a good
Growing season or is
It. Is summer just hot? …

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