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.
Chinua Achebe.
This week at The Paris Review, we’re scribbling, scratching, and reading about manuscripts and notes. Read on for Chinua Achebe’s Art of Fiction interview, Umberto Eco’s short story “The Bible,” and selections from Elizabeth Bishop’s notebooks.
If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or, better yet, subscribe to our special summer offer with The New York Review of Books for only $99. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more.
Chinua Achebe, The Art of Fiction No. 139 Issue no. 133 (Winter 1994)
INTERVIEWER I once heard your English publisher, Alan Hill, talk about how you sent the manuscript of Things Fall Apart to him. ACHEBE That was a long story. The first part of it was how the manuscript was nearly lost. In 1957 I was given a scholarship to go to London and study for some months at the BBC. I had a draft of Things Fall Apart with me, so I took it along to finish it. When I got to the BBC, one of my friends—there were two of us from Nigeria—said, Why don’t you show this to Mr. Phelps? Gilbert Phelps, one of the instructors of the BBC school, was a novelist. I said, What? No! This went on for some time. Eventually I was pushed to do it and I took the manuscript and handed it to Mr. Phelps. He said, Well . . . all right, the way I would today if anyone brought me a manuscript. He was not really enthusiastic. Why should he be? He took it anyway, very politely. He was the first person, outside of myself, to say, I think this is interesting. In fact, he felt so strongly that one Saturday he was compelled to look for me and tell me. I had traveled out of London; he found out where I was, phoned the hotel, and asked me to call him back. When I was given this message, I was completely floored.
INTERVIEWER
I once heard your English publisher, Alan Hill, talk about how you sent the manuscript of Things Fall Apart to him.
ACHEBE
That was a long story. The first part of it was how the manuscript was nearly lost. In 1957 I was given a scholarship to go to London and study for some months at the BBC. I had a draft of Things Fall Apart with me, so I took it along to finish it. When I got to the BBC, one of my friends—there were two of us from Nigeria—said, Why don’t you show this to Mr. Phelps? Gilbert Phelps, one of the instructors of the BBC school, was a novelist. I said, What? No! This went on for some time. Eventually I was pushed to do it and I took the manuscript and handed it to Mr. Phelps. He said, Well . . . all right, the way I would today if anyone brought me a manuscript. He was not really enthusiastic. Why should he be? He took it anyway, very politely. He was the first person, outside of myself, to say, I think this is interesting. In fact, he felt so strongly that one Saturday he was compelled to look for me and tell me. I had traveled out of London; he found out where I was, phoned the hotel, and asked me to call him back. When I was given this message, I was completely floored.
Photo: JLPC / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0.
The Bible By Umberto Eco Issue no. 126 (Spring 1993)
I must say that the first few hundred pages of this manuscript really hooked me. Action packed, they have everything today’s reader wants in a good story. Sex (lots of it, including adultery, sodomy, incest), also murder, war, massacres, and so on.
Photo: Sembazuru / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0).
Notebooks By Elizabeth Bishop Issue no. 174, Summer 2005
Hannah A. Of former birds who rested on ice-floes, who resisted dragons, who nested by the streams of lava where they lived alone, where marks of feathers can be seen upon the stone or in the crumbling tufa, which although weathered still is deeply feathered where the dry claws slithered [on the ……………………….scales] of those who wore fur then, or the inelegant pin— feathers that marred the skin, or dressed in scales …
Hannah A.
Of former birds who rested on ice-floes, who resisted dragons, who nested by the streams of lava where they lived alone, where marks of feathers can be seen upon the stone or in the crumbling tufa,
which although weathered still is deeply feathered where the dry claws slithered [on the ……………………….scales] of those who wore fur then, or the inelegant pin— feathers that marred the skin, or dressed in scales …
To read more from the Paris Review archives, make sure to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-seven years’ worth of archives. And for a limited time, you can subscribe to both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for just $99.
Last / Next Article
Share