May 10, 2022 Redux Redux: Even a Fact Is Not a Fact 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. Ned Rorem. Photograph from the Paris Review archives. Other people’s diaries, observes our web editor, Sophie Haigney, offer “distinct and potent pleasures, the rare, delightful, occasionally shocking intimacies of reading someone else’s private thoughts.” She’s describing “Diary, 1988,” an excerpt from Annie Ernaux’s journals that appears in our Spring issue, but the same can be said for Ned Rorem’s Art of the Diary interview, Jane Bowles’s short story “Emmy Moore’s Journal,” pages—colorful in more senses than one—from Duncan Hannah’s high-school diaries, and Charles Wright’s cycle of poems, “Five Journals.” And few other forms can be so sharp, so economical in conveying the texture of life lived in times of atrocity, as shown by Liao Yiwu’s account of the Tiananmen Square massacre, “Nineteen Days.” For more diaries, follow our new series featuring contributions from writers and artists: last week, Elisa Gonzalez shared pages from 2018 and Adam Levin looked back on a period of self-interrogation. And if you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and art 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 the Diary No. 1 Ned Rorem INTERVIEWER Auden defined the narcissist as the hunchback who gazes at his image in the water and says, On me it looks good. When I asked you about the diarist’s narcissism, I didn’t just mean the recurrence of I, but the self-absorption—whatever happens to the self is deemed of interest to others. ROREM Well, yes. Auden was right even when he was wrong. Cocteau said, “Je suis le mensonge qui dit la vérité.” All art is a lie, insofar as truth is defined by the Supreme Court. After all, Picasso’s goat isn’t a goat. Is the artist a liar, or simply one for whom even a fact is not a fact? There is no truth, not even an overall Truth. From issue no. 150 (Spring 1999) Read More
May 3, 2022 Redux Redux: The Marketing of Obsession 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. DON DELILLO, CA. 2011. PHOTOGRAPH BY THOUSANDROBOTS. “Barneys was more than a department store,” issue no. 239 contributor Adrienne Raphel reminisces in a new essay on the Daily. “A glowing spiral staircase, white as milk, wound its way through the store—the Guggenheim, but make it fashion.” This week, we’re unlocking an Art of Fiction interview with the bard of postwar American consumerism, Don DeLillo, as well as Zadie Smith’s story “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets,” Mary Ruefle’s account of shopping—as in shoplifting—at Woolworth’s in “Milk Shake,” and a series of photographs taken of Paris’s legendary market, Les Halles, in the sixties. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and art 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. 135 Don DeLillo INTERVIEWER Frank Lentricchia refers to you as the type of writer who believes that the shape and fate of the culture dictates the shape and fate of the self. DELILLO Yes, and maybe we can think about Running Dog in this respect. This book is not exactly about obsession—it’s about the marketing of obsession. Obsession as a product that you offer to the highest bidder or the most enterprising and reckless fool, which is sort of the same thing in this particular book … And in Libra, of course—here we have Oswald watching TV, Oswald working the bolt of his rifle, Oswald imagining that he and the president are quite similar in many ways. I see Oswald, back from Russia, as a man surrounded by promises of fulfillment—consumer fulfillment, personal fulfillment. But he’s poor, unstable, cruel to his wife, barely employable—a man who has to enter his own Hollywood movie to see who he is and how he must direct his fate. From issue no. 128 (Fall 1993) Read More
April 26, 2022 Redux Redux: The Poet’s Nerve 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. Claudia Rankine. Photograph by John Lucas, courtesy of Graywolf Press. “Often when I teach my poetry workshop,” Claudia Rankine tells David L. Ulin in her Art of Poetry interview, “I will take essays or passages from fiction or a scene from a film and list them among the poems to study. The ‘Time Passes’ section in the middle of To the Lighthouse is an example of a lyric impulse. Others might be a passage from James Baldwin or Homi Bhabha or an image by Glenn Ligon or a song by Coltrane.” As National Poetry Month draws to a close, we’ve been wondering what really makes a poem a poem, so we decided to consult a few experts. Draw your own conclusions from Adam Zagajewski’s “My Favorite Poets,” Gordon Lish’s “How to Write a Poem,” and a vibrant portfolio of artworks by the poet and painter Etel Adnan. And here on the Daily, you can listen to Henri Cole, whose poem “The Other Love” appears in our Spring issue, read some of his favorites from the Review’s archive, which he selected for his takeover last week of our daily poetry newsletter. INTERVIEW The Art of Poetry No. 102 Claudia Rankine As a poet, I want to use language to enter that space of feeling. I’m less interested in stories. That’s one reason I write poetry. From issue no. 219 (Winter 2016) Read More
April 19, 2022 Redux Redux: All the Green Things Writhing 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. PHOTO COURTESY OF ANTONELLA ANEDDA ANGIOY. “Spring like a gun to the head,” Dorothea Lasky writes in a poem in our latest issue, “Green how I want you.” It’s been a strange, uncertain season, and now that the weather is turning and the cherry trees are beginning to blossom, we’re revisiting some works that evoke the cruelest month: an interview with the Italian poet Antonella Anedda; a story by Ira Sadoff that makes romancing a florist sound wistful yet thrilling; Elizabeth Brewster Thomas’s poem in which “beneath your feet a thousand spores of ice / blossom in darkness”; and a collaboration between Ben Lerner and the photographer Thomas Demand, featuring a profusion of paper flowers. (And if you pick up a copy of our Spring issue, you’ll also find collages by the late artist Birdie Lusch, who pasted newspaper clippings onto Hallmark catalogues to make her glorious bouquets.) If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and art 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 Poetry No. 109 Antonella Anedda ANEDDA The first poem I ever heard was by Aleksandr Blok, on the radio in a small village in Sardinia. It’s an early work that begins, “Carried on the breeze, / the Spring’s music drifted from far, far away.” The poem was about space and wind—how the wind breaks open the clouds to reveal a strip of blue sky. INTERVIEWER What was it that moved you? ANEDDA When I was seven, a member of my family, a person I loved, died in front of me. Suddenly her body was a thing without a voice. Listening to Blok’s poem—I was thirteen or fourteen—I thought that perhaps poetry could create a relationship with absence, with death, transposing the present into another space and time. From issue no. 234 (Fall 2019) Read More
April 12, 2022 Redux Redux: Like No One Else 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. Detail from Ghost. All drawings by Ed Ruscha. “I styled myself to look like no one else,” Jamaica Kincaid tells Darryl Pinckney in an Art of Fiction interview that appears in our new issue. “And I also knew I didn’t want to write like anyone else.” Tonight, at our first Spring Revel since 2019, we will present Kincaid with our lifetime achievement award, the Hadada, while Chetna Maroo will accept the Plimpton Prize for Fiction. To celebrate, we’re revisiting work by some of the recent prizewinners we were unable to honor in person: Jonathan Escoffery, who was awarded the Plimpton in 2020; Leigh Newman, recipient of that year’s Terry Southern Prize for “humor, wit, and sprezzatura”; and N. Scott Momaday, who accepted the Hadada last year. (And if you missed the story we unlocked last month by Eloghosa Osunde, winner of the 2021 Plimpton Prize, you can always make it right by subscribing.) We’re also including a 1987 portfolio of drawings by the chair of this year’s Revel, Ed Ruscha. If you enjoy these free short stories and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. POETRY Concession N. Scott Momaday Believe the sullen sense that sickness made, And broke you in its hands. Believe that death inhabits the mere shade Intimacy demands. From issue no. 99 (Spring 1986) Read More
April 5, 2022 Redux In Memoriam: Richard Howard 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. “The translator’s relation to his to-be-translated writer, or victim,” observed Richard Howard, the poet, translator, and longtime Paris Review poetry editor, in his 2004 Art of Poetry interview, “is essentially erotic and an exchange of mental fluids that cannot be entirely justified or explained.” Howard, who passed away last week at the age of ninety-two, won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection Untitled Subjects. His impact on American letters was immeasurable. He published, in addition to his many volumes of poetry, landmark translations of Charles Baudelaire, Roland Barthes, Emil Cioran, and André Gide, among others. You can find here an oral history of his life and work that appeared on the Daily in 2017, when he won our lifetime achievement award, the Hadada. This week, we’re unlocking his 2004 interview as well as his poem “On Tour,” his translation of Baudelaire’s “Parisian Dream,” and an excerpt from his translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, accompanied by a brief conversation with George Plimpton. As Craig Morgan Teicher, our digital director and a former student of Howard’s, writes, “To sit with him was to sit in the glorious eye of a thousand-year literary storm, to be guided through its currents, to be invited in.” If you enjoy these free interviews, poems, and translations, 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 Poetry No. 86 Richard Howard History and high culture were indeed my real home, and I found them right there in our house—in the library which became, indeed, my precocious playroom. Reading was an interior exile, so that I didn’t have to look away from home, as you put it, just further in. From issue no. 138 (Spring 1996) Read More