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.

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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

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

All stills from The Hedgehog (2024). Photographs courtesy of Zheng Zhi.

The writer Zheng Zhi’s first novel, Floating, was published in China in 2007, when he was nineteen years old. Since then, he has published three more—a fifth will come out this year—as well as numerous volumes of short fiction, all while writing prolifically for film and television. His literary career has placed him at the vanguard of what is now known as the Dongbei renaissance, a group of writers hailing from the northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Zheng’s native Liaoning, all of whose upbringings were marked by the recession that occurred there in the eighties and nineties. Given Zheng’s stature in his home country, it feels surprising that “The Hedgehog,” which appears in the Review’s new Spring issue, is his first work of fiction to be published in English. With help from the novelist Jeremy Tiang, who translated the story, we spoke to Zheng about the turns of fate and the funding issues that have, over the years, led him away from and back to serious writing, as well as about his childhood fear, which makes its way into the story, that his sanity would hold out for only so long.

—Owen Park

INTERVIEWER

“The Hedgehog” was first published anonymously with the title Xiānzhèng (Immortal syndrome), as part of a competition in the literary magazine Lǐ (Newriting). The story caused a bit of a stir among readers in the Chinese literary world as they struggled to guess the identity of its author. Up to that point, you’d been more successful in the realm of commercial fiction. What was it like to participate in this anonymous contest?

ZHENG ZHI

The entries were a mixture of open submissions and solicited manuscripts. One of the editors, Zhou Jianing, approached me to ask if I’d be interested, and of course I accepted the challenge, in part to force myself to try something new. Six months later, with the deadline fast approaching, Jianing checked in to see how I was doing—and as I’d completely forgotten that I’d agreed to do it, I ended up writing the whole story in the final three days. The word limit was twenty thousand characters, and my story was nineteen thousand. If not for this restriction, I’d probably have kept going and turned it into a novella or even a short novel. All the short-listed stories appeared in the magazine—I remember they were spread across three issues over three or four months—and also on the magazine’s WeChat page. Readers had the choice of buying the magazine or simply reading them online. As promised, the stories were credited only by a serial number—I was no. 11—and people were speculating about who each author might be. I was surprised by how many young writers got involved in these discussions, which became quite animated. The organizers did a good job keeping things confidential—or at least I didn’t know who any of the other authors were. The whole competition felt fair, and very exciting. I’d previously seen this sort of “anonymous” competition only in the world of variety shows, where singers wear masks and the audience has to guess who they are based on their voices. The way I see it, an author’s style is equivalent to a singer’s voice. Being identifiable is very important. Read More

Robert Frost, between 1910 and 1920, via Library of Congress. Public domain.

Though he is most often associated with New England, Robert Frost (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, taught school like his mother did before him, and became a farmer, the sleeping-in kind, since he wrote at night. He didn’t publish a book of poems until he was thirty-nine, but went on to win four Pulitzers. By the end of his life, he could fill a stadium for a reading. Frost is still well known, occasionally even beloved, but is significantly more known than he is read. When he is included in a university poetry course, it is often as an example of the conservative poetics from which his more provocative, difficult modernist contemporaries (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound) sought to depart. A few years ago, I set out to write a dissertation on Frost, hoping that sustained focus on his work might allow me to discover a critical language for talking about accessible poems, the kind anybody could read. My research kept turning up interpretations of Frost’s poems that were smart, even beautiful, but were missing something. It was not until I found the journalist Adam Plunkett’s work that I was able to see what that was. “We misunderstand him,” Plunkett wrote of Frost in a 2014 piece for The New Republic, “when, in studying him, we disregard our unstudied reactions.” We love to point out, for example, that the two roads in “The Road Not Taken” are worn “really about the same,” as though to say that your first impression of the poem—as about choosing the road “less traveled by”—was wrong. For Plunkett, “the wrongness is part of the point, the temptation into believing, as in the speaker’s impression of himself, that you could form yourself by your decisions … as the master of your fate.” Subsequent googling told me that Plunkett had been publishing essays and reviews, mostly about poetry, rather regularly until 2015, when he seemed to have fallen off the edge of the internet. After many search configurations, including “adam plunkett obituary,” I found a brief bio that said he was working on a new critical biography of Robert Frost, the book that would become Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He responded to my October 2022 email, explaining that he had “stopped writing much journalism as of 2015 so as to avoid distractions from a book project that I thought would take an almost unfathomably long time—two years or perhaps even three. Seven years later, I’m doing my best to polish the third draft.” Just as Plunkett is the unique reader of Frost interested in both our studied and unstudied reactions to the poems, he is the unique biographer of Frost whose work is neither hagiography nor slander. His is a middle way of which, I think, Frost would approve. Recently, we talked on the phone about why Frost has become uncool, Greek drama, and, relatedly, the soul.

INTERVIEWER

What makes you and Frost a good fit?

ADAM PLUNKETT

I tend not to think that stuff other people think is obvious is obvious.

INTERVIEWER

And Frost is obvious?

PLUNKETT

Everyone feels like they have some sense of Frost. Everyone knows a poem or two. That kind of overexposure lends an aspect of at least apparent obviousness. But there’s another aspect, too, which is that many people read Frost for the first time as children and associate him with an early stage of life. There’s a cultural association between the time of exposure and the level of sophistication. You’d sound pretty vulgar if you said, Oh, yeah, I learned to play Bach when I was thirteen—that’s easy stuff. But people really do make pronouncements like that about literature. Someone I met a few years ago, a big poetry person, just could not believe that an adult would spend years of his life thinking about Robert Frost. To her it seemed like doing a Ph.D. in simple algebra. Read More