April 17, 2026 At Work The Conundrums of Jan Morris: A Conversation with Sara Wheeler By Jamie Lauren Keiles Mount Everest. Photograph by Nir B. Gurung, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Jan Morris rose to fame in 1953 as a reporter working for the Times when she carried the news of the first ascent of Mount Everest back to base camp, England, and the world on the eve of Elizabeth II’s coronation. It was arguably the British Empire’s last triumph. Over the course of the next seven decades, Morris—at that time publishing as James—traveled widely through the empire’s dwindling dominion, writing sumptuously about colonial decline and the rise of a new postwar global order. After changing her sex in 1972 at Georges Burou’s famous Casablanca clinic, she published the best-selling memoir Conundrum (1974), a finely tuned and deeply felt account of the perils and strange delights of self-creation. When the scandal of her transformation had settled, Morris resumed her literary career, writing on Venice, Hong Kong, Trieste, the political rise of Abraham Lincoln, the history of Japanese battleships, and other geopolitical engrossments, until her death in 2020. Her life and work brought her into contact with many significant plot arcs of the twentieth century—not just the rearrangement of the world order but also the birth of LGBT civic consciousness. Despite this serendipitous proximity, she presents, in death, as a weak candidate for entry to any known saintly canon. Blithely humanistic, avowedly bourgeois, and often romantic to a point of equivocation, she’s suitable neither as a pride-month “trancestor” nor as a great literary firebrand. A new biography, Jan Morris: A Life—authorized by her children, who manage her estate—tries to figure out what to do with these loose ends. Its author, Sara Wheeler, is also a travel writer. She called me on Zoom with a shaky connection from “the ancient Atlantic Forest in central Paraguay,” where she was on assignment. We talked about Morris’s splintered legacy and the challenges of summing up a life. Read More
December 1, 2025 At Work Catching Up with Helen Fielding By Rosa Lyster Photograph by Romy Curran. Bridget Jones made her first appearance in February 1995, complaining amiably about her publishing job and obsessing over her rakish boss in a diary column in London’s Independent newspaper. “Last Tuesday, at the Cheapskate’s Wine Guide launch, weeks of flirtation appeared to climax. When the others were boring on about Stephen Fry […] Daniel moved behind me and murmured, “So … will I see you?” and then, more quietly, “I mean … see you?” – so horny.” The writer of the column, Helen Fielding, had already published one novel, Cause Celeb, but it was Bridget—a worrier, a charmer, an expert at having a good time—who would make Fielding famous. The diaristic column, published anonymously at first, was a smash hit. Readers responded immediately to Fielding’s vivid portrait of single life in nineties London. Her novel Bridget Jones’s Diary—whose structure and characters were based loosely on those of Pride and Prejudice—was published less than a year after that first column, and Bridget became a kind of generational touchstone, a beloved figurehead and a lightning rod for critique. Fielding, who was thirty-seven, originally from West Yorkshire, and still working at the newspaper, meanwhile became almost as famous as a writer can get. What is so striking, reading those very first columns thirty years on, is that it’s all there, right from the beginning: the levity and humor, even the influence of Austen. (Even before Fielding named her heroine’s love interest after Mr. Darcy, Bridget was moodily watching the BBC adaptation of Persuasion and concluding that she was Anne Elliot.) We can see Bridget’s combination of self-awareness and obliviousness, her cheerful resignation about the possibility of behaving like an idiot again sometime soon. Her voice is so instantly recognizable that one might forget that she didn’t always exist, that Fielding made her up, one day in the nineties. I caught up with Fielding about her writing life and the years since those early columns. She has gone on to write four more books—three more Bridget Jones novels and one standalone spy novel—and to work on the wildly popular film adaptations. Over Zoom, we talked about the role Austen has played in her work, her penchant for and methods of social observation, and what it’s like to have an alter ego. She is thoughtful and funny, with a finely tuned sense of the absurd. INTERVIEWER Did you always know that you were going to be a writer? HELEN FIELDING Words were the thing felt I had a facility with. I knew what to do with them, which I didn’t feel with a lot of other things—cooking, driving, anything practical, I wasn’t very good at. But I always wrote, starting when I was very small. I remember I put the word immobilized in an essay and a teacher at school wrote, “Whose word is this?”—implying that my parents had done my homework. I used to read a lot. Just anything. I liked words and all my family were all very funny, so we were always fooling around and making jokes. I grew up in the industrial north, it was quite sooty and dark. I’d read Jackie Collins and think, Oh, if I was a writer, I could have a swimming pool and be free and not have to go to work and I could go live somewhere hot. INTERVIEWER How do you write? Do you write every day? FIELDING I will if I’m in full-on mode. With a novel, there are some phases where you’re just thinking and gathering material and then it’ll get a momentum. I tend to do an old-fashioned working day, about ten till six. I don’t work in the evenings, and I don’t work on the weekends, so my mind knows, Okay, it’s time to do the writing now. When you get deep into a novel, into a flow state, it’s really nice and you don’t want to stop doing it. But before you get to that point, it’s harder. I always feel a bit unsettled if I’m not writing regularly—it’s like I haven’t got my handbag or something. Read More
November 11, 2025 At Work What Really Happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?: A Conversation with Lance Richardson By Dan Piepenbring Peter Matthiessen in New York City, 1961. Photograph by Ben Martin/Getty Images. When Peter Matthiessen’s name comes up in conjunction with The Paris Review, two facts are sure to emerge. The first is that Matthiessen was one of the magazine’s founders, and that his enchantingly shabby Paris apartment provided a bumptious gathering place in its earliest days. The second is that he was, at the time, an undercover CIA operative, and that the creation of the magazine was somehow wrapped up in his spycraft. The New York Times revealed Matthiessen’s CIA affiliation in a bombshell 1977 story with the headline “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,” which examined dozens of publications and cultural organizations that had been secretly “owned, subsidized or influenced in some way by the C.I.A. over the past three decades.” Matthiessen’s connection rated only three brief sentences buried at the center of what he called a “long gray article”; the reporter, John Crewdson, noted that there was no evidence the CIA had used the writer “to influence the Paris Review.” Even so, Matthiessen spent the rest of his life facing questions about his role. He had left the agency in 1953, after about two years, but he never divulged the details of his work for the organization, which remain unclear even now, eleven years after his death. Some have speculated that the Review itself received CIA support as part of the agency’s broader effort to prop up pro-Western art and literature. At the peak of its influence, in the fifties and sixties, the CIA fronted money to support a broad array of cultural production, from the seemingly innocuous to the expressly anti-communist. Among many other ventures, it had its hand in abstract-expressionist painting, jazz, Radio Free Asia, literary magazines, academic books on Finland and East Germany, a Roman newspaper, and an animated film adaptation of Animal Farm. While some artists were aware of the source of their funding, many were not. Given that The Paris Review portrayed itself as studiously apolitical—recall William Styron’s famous anti-manifesto in the first issue, fashioning it as a home for “the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders”—Matthiessen’s CIA involvement has raised questions and eyebrows since its revelation in the seventies. Lance Richardson’s True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen is the first biography of the writer. Matthiessen, born in New York in 1927, was the author of ten novels, two collections of stories, and nearly two dozen works of nonfiction; he is the only writer to have won the National Book Award for both fiction (for Shadow Country, in 2008) and nonfiction (for The Snow Leopard, in 1980). A keen observer of the natural world, he traveled widely in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean in search of remote places where one could find a “glimpse of the earth’s morning,” as he described it. True Nature offers a deft assessment of his work and a capacious telling of the forces that shaped his interest in everything from Zen Buddhism to environmentalism to cryptozoology to labor rights. Richardson conducted hundreds of interviews over seven and a half years, and his archival research yielded, among many other insights, a clearer picture of The Paris Review’s first years, when Matthiessen was doing double duty as a fiction editor and a secret agent. I spoke to Richardson by phone to ask what he’d discovered about Matthiessen’s years in Paris. INTERVIEWER What do we know about why Peter Matthiessen decided to join the CIA—the decision that led, eventually, to the founding of The Paris Review? LANCE RICHARDSON Before he died, in anticipation of a possible memoir, Matthiessen wrote out a series of narratives about what he’d been doing in Paris. The title of one of them is “THE PARIS REVIEW V. THE CIA: My Half-life as a Capitalist Running Dog.” They were incomplete, and I had to be careful about assuming everything was one hundred percent accurate—not because Peter was necessarily trying to leave a trail of lies or anything, but because he was writing this decades after it happened, and he had his own agenda. In terms of other materials, the CIA wouldn’t give me anything. I filed FOIA requests. I talked to their entertainment liaison, who works with Hollywood. But they don’t declassify personnel records. As Matthiessen tells it, he had finished Yale in 1950 and wanted to be a writer, but how do you just become a writer? His English professor Norman Holmes Pearson tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he wanted to do something for his country. This was happening quite a lot at Yale at the time. One of Matthiessen’s contemporaries estimated that two dozen of their classmates were recruited for the CIA through various professors. The agency called them the “P source,” for “professor.” Matthiessen wrote that Pearson opened him “like an oyster.” Not because he was ideologically driven—his politics at that point were unformed and chaotic—but because he wanted a stipend and an excuse to go to Paris, which was a city that he and his first wife, Patsy Southgate, really loved. The CIA then was reputationally much more benign, at least domestically. It hadn’t yet become known by most Americans for its involvement in coups and things like that. Read More
July 28, 2025 At Work Ten Questions for Joy Williams By The Paris Review WITH ROBERT STONE IN KEY WEST, CA. 1995. “Forgive me for the things I have done and for the things I have left undone,” Joy Williams said in 2014, in her Paris Review Art of Fiction interview. “I may very well write out of a sense of guilt.” Her new story “After the Haiku Period,” which appears in the Review’s Summer 2025 issue, is a story of guilt askew, which centers on a pair of twins in their sixties, the daughters of a coal-bed-methane-drilling-company tycoon (“We called Daddy Midas,” one sister says. “Everything he touched turned into some ghastly energy source”) and their devoted “sage,” Jimmy, who knows just what to pack for their picnics. Fueled by white wine, lemon squares, and family shame, Camilla and Candida make a pastime of hatching dramatic plots to make the “destroyers and despoilers and death dealers” pay—until finally, one night, they take the plunge. Williams—who has published twelve stories in The Paris Review, dating back to 1968—is hesitant to talk about craft. (“I do believe there is, in fact, a mystery to the whole enterprise that one dares to investigate at peril,” she said in her interview.) Still, we couldn’t resist sending her a few questions about the mysterious enterprise of this particular story, which she responded to over email. THE EDITORS Will you tell us about where you’re writing to us from, and set the scene? WILLIAMS The desert, where it’s 110 degrees. Read More
July 21, 2025 At Work The Guts of the Russian Brontosaurus-Cow: A Conversation with Vladimir Sorokin By Joshua Cohen Vladimir Sorokin. Photograph by Maria Sorokina. My problems started much earlier than the night before deadline—they started in my childhood, when I completely failed to learn Russian, and though an inability to function in a writer’s original language has never stopped me and shouldn’t stop anyone from pronouncing upon a translation, I admit that in my maturing years I ran into compounding difficulties, including the facts that I’ve never lived and written in a country that proscribes me, that I’ve never had to leave the country of my language and gone to settle abroad, that I’ve never had to live up to or live against a new identity projected onto me in exile as something of an artist-spokesman for political opposition, and—believe it or not—that I’ve never been mistaken for a one-man repository or symbol-embodiment of my literary culture, which happens to be one of the foremost literary cultures in the history of the world. It’s so much easier, I’m realizing now, to introduce a book by a writer who stayed at mediocre home, surrounded by his more-or-less admiring publishers who publish him, and his more-or-less admiring readers who read him; it’s so much easier, in other words, to introduce a book by a writer who is dead, which is admittedly how I feel sometimes, in my shut-into-my-apartment-and-English existence. Read More
June 17, 2025 At Work Catching up with Geoff Dyer By Sophie Haigney Young Geoff Dyer and a lawnmower. Photograph courtesy of Geoff Dyer. Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, was originally called “A Happening.” There would have been something of a joke to this discarded title; from one point of view, nothing much happens in the book. There’s an indelible ordinariness to this coming-of-age story, which, with a few detours, follows Dyer’s early life until he reaches the age of eighteen, in the world of working-class Gloucestershire of the sixties and seventies. Any readers hoping for shocking revelations about the author’s childhood will not find much to titillate them. But of course from another point of view, everything happens. Dyer—has written many books, including Out of Sheer Rage, Jeff in Venice, and most recently The Last Days of Roger Federer—describes in great detail the period in which he became himself, in all the erudition, playfulness, and creativity we might already be familiar with. (Out of Sheer Rage, nominally a book about trying to write a book about D. H. Lawrence, is essential reading for any writer of nonfiction: a funny, moving account of the creative process in its frustrations and joys.) In Homework, Dyer turns his attention to his early life, down even to the accessories his Action Man figurine wore: “the plastic lace patterns on Action’s boots; the khaki elastic strap of his carbine; the little buckle on the helmet strap and the plastic niche into which it was anchored; the genetic logo embossed on his back: Made in England by Palitoy under Licence from Hasbro © 1964.” Even more impressive is Dyer’s ability to give narrative life to this archive of detail, half a century later. His mother and father are sharply drawn characters, along with the rest of the family. “It was said of Joe that if you filled a bath with beer he’d drink it,” Dyer writes about an uncle. “(I heard this said many times. In Shrewsbury few things were said only once. Everything was repeated over and over.)” Anecdotes are recycled, gaining a kind of mythic status, like “little Audrey Stanley” who used to work with his mother in the school canteen. With these repeated sayings and formulations and anecdotes Dyer conjures something deeper than detail: the lost world of his childhood, but also the lost world of the particular time, place, and class he inhabited. (“Class itself is not a thing, it is a happening,” E. P. Thompson writes, a quote Dyer includes as a postscript to the book, for indeed, it is something that happened to him.) Dyer’s Art of Nonfiction interview appeared in The Paris Review in 2013. We caught up on the phone a few weeks ago about Homework—and about how he managed to render childhood without being boring. INTERVIEWER This is a highly detailed, specific memoir about your early life, but also one that describes a bygone era in a particular time and place. How did you balance those two threads, of the personal and social history? GEOFF DYER One of the earliest impulses I had was to do something like Annie Ernaux’s The Years, a kind of generational autobiography. I thought it would be cool to do a Gloucestershire, English version of that French book. It ended up being quite different, but the key thing is that there’s nothing interesting about my story. It’s not like I’m a celebrity whose life people are interested in. Also, there are no great revelations. I haven’t discovered I have an illegitimate brother. There’s no abuse. It’s just my story, which is pretty uneventful. But it contains a larger social history of England and a particular phase of English life which I believe is worth preserving. It was my wife who kept saying that I should write this book for that reason, not just out of self-indulgence. The paradox, and it’s a well worn one, is that I could write this larger social history only by telling my own story. When I was discussing this with my American editor, he said, “Should you have an introduction that makes it clear that this is really a book about class?” And I said no, because every detail in the book is so steeped in class. However microscopically, if you look at the evidence, it’s all there. Read More