March 13, 2017 From the Archive Why Did They Resist Her? By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Darwish’s Journal of an Ordinary Grief. Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was born on this day in 1941; he died in 2008. A few years before, facing a nightly curfew as Israeli tanks rumbled through his streets, Darwish spoke to BOMB about the genesis of his interest in poetry: Read More
February 28, 2017 From the Archive Talking Out of School By Dan Piepenbring Stephen Spender. Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. Stephen Spender, born on this day in 1909, was interviewed for our Art of Poetry series in 1980. It’s a gossipy, unrestrained interview, with asides about Yeats, Hemingway, Eliot, Pound, and Auden, among others. But maybe Spender was running his mouth too much; the interview occasioned a pair of heated responses from Martha Gellhorn and Laura Riding Jackson, both of whom disputed the facts he’d relayed to his interviewer. Their letters were so long, and so full-throated in their denunciations, that we published them in their entirety in our Spring 1981 issue, allowing Spender to respond to both. Read More
February 2, 2017 From the Archive The Engraver’s Delicate Hammer By Dan Piepenbring Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. James Dickey, who would be ninety-four today, contributed a handful of poems to the Review throughout his career. In our Fall 1985 issue, he also published, most anomalously, a remembrance of Truman Capote, whom he’d only met once. “Indeed,” the editors wrote then, “his only firm recollection was a chance meeting in New York’s Gotham Book Mart at which—as Southerners tend to do—the two talked about relatives: Capote had an aunt ‘up ’round Buford way.’ ” Read More
January 26, 2017 From the Archive A Comic Masterpiece from the Seventies By Dan Piepenbring From Carcanet’s edition of The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium. Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. Harry Mathews, who died yesterday at eighty-six, was a prolific contributor to the Review. His fifth book, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, was the first novel this magazine ever serialized; it ran in four installments, starting with our Spring 1971 issue. Mathews claimed he was rejected twenty-five times before he found a publisher for it. Reviewing it for the New York Times in 1975, Edmund White called it “a comic masterpiece, as funny as Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, as intricate as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire … [Mathews] has created a seamless fabric, as tense, light, and strong as stretched silk.” The truth in that assessment is clear from the novel’s opening paragraphs. It opens midsentence: Read More
January 19, 2017 From the Archive The Business of Power By Dan Piepenbring Rembrandt’s Trumpeter—emphasize the first syllable, if you wish. Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. I don’t need to come right out and say why Peter Leight’s poem “The Business of Power,” from our Spring–Summer 1978 issue, appeals to me at present. Just to see the words “business” and “power” sharing a line is probably more than enough for you to get the gist. I’m not going to raise an eyebrow at the “lumps, muffs, stomach folds, pendant chins” that comprise the bodies of the ruling class, as Leight describes them; nor am I going to note that a phrase like “showcasing girth” is so sickeningly relevant right now as to make one wince; nor will I sally forth and deliver my long thesis on the lines “they mask their puissance and assume a cheapness that ensures / acceptability,” because you know what that thesis is—we’re all living it. So here, then, just read the poem: it may as well have been written two minutes ago, and I fear we’ll be saying the same after another thirty-nine years have passed. It begins, Read More
January 15, 2017 From the Archive The Shadow Shod in Fur By Dan Piepenbring Photo of Osip Mandelstam made by the NKVD after his arrest in 1938. Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. In our Summer–Fall 1961 issue, we published a portfolio of poems by Osip Mandelstam, born on January 15, 1891, a Russian writer who was arrested under Stalin and exiled in the 1930s. Sentenced to a labor camp in Siberia, he died en route at a transit camp, aged forty-seven. In one poem, he writes, Read More