August 17, 2026 Redux James Joyce’s Baby Impressions and Other “Awkward Pleasures” of Literary Biography By Daisy Hildyard In the Lake District, 1994. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews for our readers from our archive. This week, we’ve unlocked our interview with Hermione Lee, selected from the archive by Daisy Hildyard, whose story “Two Lives” appears in our recent Summer issue. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces to your inbox every Sunday morning. Everybody dabbles in biography. If you have ever spoken at a funeral, rewritten your CV, or gossiped, you’ve had to deal with some of the questions that Hermione Lee discusses with Louisa Thomas in her Art of Biography interview. What is the shape of a life? What are the ingredients of an achievement? What specific person and what particular circumstances produced it? When something fails, do we have to find somebody to blame? Lee addresses these questions as matters of technique: the work of finding, or inventing, “a structure that is sympathetic to the subject.” Read More
August 3, 2026 Redux My Year of Tests and Arbitration By The Paris Review Courtesy of Ottessa Moshfegh. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews for our readers from our archive. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces to your inbox every Sunday morning. The first thing you learn about the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Bettering Myself,” published in issue no. 204 of the Review, is that she pukes in the nuns’ bathroom in the mornings. Miss Mooney is a jaded teacher at a Ukrainian Catholic school, prone to showing up hungover, faking her students’ state exams, napping on the job in a sleeping bag, and offering such wisdom as: You can’t “get fat from being ejaculated into.” Read More
July 21, 2026 Redux How Could I Forget Odysseus? By The Paris Review “An ambitious adaptation of the Odyssey, enacted by us children.” Photograph courtesy of Emily Wilson. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews for our readers from our archive. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces to your inbox every Sunday morning. In 2017, to accompany her translation of the Odyssey, which was excerpted in issue no. 221 of the Review, Emily Wilson wrote a piece for our website in which she recalls performing in a children’s production of Homer’s epic at eight years old. It was this turn on the stage that inspired Wilson’s early encounters with the text she would come to translate. “I loved that Odysseus could transition so easily from being somebody to being nobody, and back again,” she writes. Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost … Read More
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