January 9, 2017 From the Archive Winter Shadow Box 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. We’re at that time when winter loses what little charm it had: the twinkling lights come down, the mercury plunges, and what felt two weeks ago like rosy-cheeked novelty is now pure marrow-sucking viciousness, part of a stimulus package for brown-liquor distillers. Everyone is holed up with a fifth of something. To deceive yourself that you have the wherewithal to go outdoors, you need wintertime propaganda. I found some in our Winter 1976 issue courtesy of Cletus Johnson, who designs what he’s called “stage sets for the play of the spectator’s imagination.” As the editors explained, Read More
January 3, 2017 From the Archive Guy Davenport’s Elusive Prose By Norman Rush London Tower Bridge, 1901. 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. Below, Norman Rush recommends a story from our Summer 1996 issue by Guy Davenport. The other day I realized that the contemporary American writer whose personal journals I most wished I could read before I die was Guy Davenport. In my scan, I included masters in every specialty—poetry, the essay, plays, short and long fictions. It still came out Davenport. And it was Davenport because of his achievements in fiction. I mean his latter-day fictions. He tried, and then abandoned, the conventional narrative-driven change-of-consciousness short story early in his career while distinguishing himself in poetry, translation, and criticism. Twenty years elapsed, and then he emerged, utterly remade, as a creator of experimental prose works. his stories are unique constructs. They are put together with elegant skill and power and tend toward the unclassifiable. In fact, scrutinous readers may change their minds more than once in the matter of what exactly it is that they are reading: Are these essentially armatures for Davenport’s aphorisms and philosophical asides? Are they primarily demonstrations of the possibilities in the interpenetration of poetic and prose forms (and visual—he sometimes illustrated his pieces). Are they freestanding baubles? In his “inhabiting,” in his writing, of the minds of iconic figures in the history of Western art and thought, is he being obscurely didactic? Is he subtly deconstructing the inner lives of culture heroes like Picasso and Diogenes?—What? Read More
December 28, 2016 From the Archive The Subtractionist By Sam Lipsyte 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 the famous Mary Robison story “Yours,” an elderly man and his young wife carve pumpkins on their porch for Halloween. Hers are messy and mediocre, while the husband, a retired doctor and “Sunday watercolorist,” creates inventive, expressive faces. Later, after a startling turn in this very short story, the old man wishes he could tell his wife his truth, “that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little.” It’s a fascinating idea to consider in relation to Robison, one of the enormous talents (and great practitioners) of the short story in America. Maybe it speaks to her deep knowledge of the various ways life tears at us, that there are monstrous crushings—death, abandonment—and then there are constant abrasions. Most people learn to live with both. Most people, Robison’s people, also, while maybe waiting around for the pain to subside, or at least turn briefly amusing, laugh, console each other, make dinner, sit on a bench, and try new tricks for better candlelight. Read More
December 26, 2016 From the Archive Denis Johnson’s Perfect Short Story By Jeffrey Eugenides 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. A short story must be, by definition, short. That’s the trouble with short stories. That’s why they’re so difficult to write. How do you keep a narrative brief and still have it function as a story? Compared to writing novels, writing short fiction is mainly a question of knowing what to leave out. What you leave in must imply everything that’s missing. If you’d like to learn how to do this, you’d be well advised to study Denis Johnson’s blisteringly acute “Car-Crash While Hitchhiking.” In this story—and indeed, in all of the stories in Johnson’s brilliant collection, Jesus’ Son—Johnson found a way to leave out the maximum in terms of plot, setting characterization, and authorial explanation while finding a voice that suggested all these things, a voice whose brokenness is the reason behind the narrative deprivation, and therefore a kind of explanation itself. Read More
December 23, 2016 From the Archive All This Giving By Nicole Rudick Our new, redesigned website marks the debut of our complete digital archive: now subscribers can read every piece from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading our back issues right away; you can also try a free ten-day trial period. Read More
December 22, 2016 From the Archive Living in the Now By Sylvie McNamara 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. We’ll use this space to feature recommendations from our staff. This week, our intern Sylvie McNamara recommends Joy Williams. We live in an age of fervent, misguided, conspiratorial belief. Fluoridated drinking water is poisonous. Michelle Obama was born a man. There are incriminating references to “pizza” in John Podesta’s e-mails. We might try to buy our way out: with yoga, green tea, reusable grocery bags, or a two-week fast in Bavaria. But regardless, ideology “proliferates … as merchandise,” as Jia Tolentino has written. “We can buy anything that suits us and nothing that we really need.” “The Yard Boy” is Joy Williams’ answer to 2016, though it was published in The Paris Review’s Winter 1977 issue. It’s a story about a true believer: a self-professed spiritual materialist who does not understand this term to be derisive, a label for those who would seek spirituality through consumerism or ego. He’s a zealot entrapped by platitudes with a New Age aura (“nothing is more obvious than the hidden” or “the moon can shine in one hundred different bowls”). His quest to live “in the Now” unravels his life. Read More