March 8, 2022 Redux Redux: Of Continuous Change By The Paris Review 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. ELIAS KHOURY, IN 2007. Elias Khoury began his 2017 Art of Fiction interview with the wry observation that “American reviewers read Arabic literature as if they’re reading the newspaper.” This week, we’re thinking—as we stare, helpless and sore-eyed, at our feeds—about the relationship between journalism and literature, and how artists, writers, and readers might respond to the news. Alongside Khoury’s interview, we revisit a short story by Stephen Minot, a Patricia Smith poem, and a portfolio of works from Peter and Annette Nobel’s collection of “press art.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. INTERVIEW The Art of Fiction No. 233 Elias Khoury INTERVIEWER How do you continue to write novels when every day seems to bring news of some new atrocity or human calamity in your backyard? KHOURY I’ve lived my life under a state of near permanent war. I was born in 1948 and have vivid memories of the “small” civil war of 1958. The defeat of 1967 brought me to political consciousness. And I began writing novels during the first years of our major civil war. I try not to write about war, but to write from within it. One has to write through these calamities and atrocities. I think it’s good practice—for writing and for living—but it isn’t ever easy. From issue no. 220 (Spring 2017) Read More
March 8, 2022 Re-Covered Re-Covered: Edith Templeton By Lucy Scholes In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photograph by Lucy Scholes. “You are so exquisitely made,” the American Major in Edith Templeton’s 1968 short story “The Darts of Cupid” tells the object of his desire, “I could break every bone in your body.” This predation is unsettling, as is the completeness with which Eve, the young woman who’s being seduced, embraces the role of submissive victim. Entwined in her new lover’s arms, she’s reminded of a Japanese print she once saw, in which a naked female corpse, floating in the sea, is penetrated by the many tentacles of a large octopus. Her physical and emotional surrender is similarly all-encompassing: “I knew that this was the rendering of love as it should be: trapped inescapably, secure and fastened, drowned in bed and water, both cradle and grave.” Read More
March 7, 2022 First Person To the Son of the Victim By Sophie Haigney Santa Rosa–Tagatay Road in Don Jose, Santa Rosa, California. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Santa Rosa, California I met you the day your father was shot and killed. I’d been in Oakland for a pink sunrise, watching police sweep a homeless encampment, gathering what we called “string” from residents who had nowhere—yet again—to go. I felt more outraged than usual and also maybe more useful. This was journalism, I suppose I was thinking, making sure the world knew what was happening right here. I wrote three hundred words for my newspaper’s website in a café and was preparing to drive back across the Bay Bridge in brilliant golden morning light. Then I got a call. Read More
March 4, 2022 Poetry The One Who Happened By Xi Chuan Illustration by Thomas Colligan. He happened to hear the world was square, like the square table at home that could be used for eating or playing cards on. He happened to hear that the emperor is made so by divine right, but he was just a commoner so that’s nothing. He happened to have not heard of Hitler; that guy with a little mustache avoided him for nineteen years. He happened to have not heard of the Cultural Revolution, and looked at himself in the mirror in a positive light. Read More
March 3, 2022 The Review’s Review Vesna By The Paris Review Ukrainian ethno band DakhaBrakha on its concert in Lviv. Photo by Lyudmyla Dobrynina, Creative Commons license via Wikimedia Commons. I have been thinking often of the 2017 anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky. The collection includes nine poems by Lyuba Yakimchuk, who grew up in Luhansk, one of the regions taken by Russia-backed separatists in 2014. Her poems of that period bear witness to the decomposition of a country, a region, an identity, and language itself. Her words break apart under the pressure of violence: “my friends are hostages / and I can’t reach them, I can’t do netsk / to pull them out of the basements.” Now Yakimchuk is in Kyiv, working to help defend the capital as Russian shells fall. When the invasion began, she was already trained in military-style first aid and well stocked with supplies; she donated much of her store of gasoline to the local Territorial Defense Forces for Molotov cocktails. She has been documenting her experience on social media and in frequent interviews. Read More
March 2, 2022 First Person Against Any Intrusion: Writing to Gwen John By Celia Paul Santa Monica, 2019, oil on canvas, 40 x 48″. Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro. February 14, 2019 Santa Monica, California Dearest Gwen, I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I’m alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, “Time is a strange substance,” and who knows really, with our time-bound comprehension of the world, whether there might be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how: like tuning a radio so that the crackling sound of the airwaves is slipstreamed into words. Maybe the sound of surf, or of rushing water, is actually the echoes of voices that have been similarly distorted through time. I don’t suppose this is true, and you don’t either. But I do feel mysteriously connected to you. Read More