September 28, 2026 Redux And Then Somebody Handed Me a Story: Gary Indiana, Unlocked By Natalie Shapero Gary Indiana in his New York apartment, February 2002. © Sylvia Plachy. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, we’ve unlocked Gary Indiana’s Art of Fiction interview, selected from the archive by Natalie Shapero, whose poem “The Top of Hell” appears in our new Fall issue. Tobi Haslett’s prefatory note to Gary Indiana’s Art of Fiction interview, published in issue no. 238 of the Review, mentions the very large number of books lining the walls of Indiana’s New York City apartment. “More books,” Haslett observes, “are always arriving.” Three years later, following Indiana’s passing in 2024, this impressive and assuredly eclectic book collection was boxed up and shipped across the country to a planned library site in Altadena, California, where, on arrival, it was promptly incinerated in its entirety by the Eaton Fire. Read More
September 14, 2026 Redux You Have to Ask Questions: Svetlana Alexievich, Unlocked By The Paris Review Svetlana Alexievich with a cameraman in Kabul, 1988. Courtesy of Svetlana Alexievich. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, to read alongside our inaugural Art of Oral History interview with Alexievich, we’ve unlocked “Voices from Chernobyl” from issue no. 172 (Winter 2004). “If you cut straight to the part you need, which is what journalists do, it won’t be interesting, and it won’t be the truth, either. Not the whole truth,” the Nobel Prize–winning Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich tells Elena Kostyuchenko in The Art of Oral History No. 1, published in our new Fall issue. “You have to ask questions, of course. Your job is to scour away the banality and return people to their true selves, to make them face what they rarely tap into.” Read More
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 from our archive for our readers. This week, we’ve unlocked our interview with Hermione Lee, selected by Daisy Hildyard, whose story “Two Lives” appears in our recent Summer issue. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces in 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 from our archive for our readers. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces in 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 from our archive for our readers. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces in 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