April 20, 2021 Redux Redux: Spreading Privacies on the Internet 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. Milan Kundera, ca. 1980. Photo: Elisa Cabot. This week at The Paris Review, we’re spending too much time online. Read on for Milan Kundera’s Art of Fiction interview, Hiromi Kawakami’s short story “Mogera Wogura,” and Stephen Dunn’s poem “Historically Speaking.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off. Milan Kundera, The Art of Fiction No. 81 Issue no. 92 (Summer 1984) Today one can compose music with a computer, but the computer always existed in composers’ heads—if they had to, composers could write sonatas without a single original idea, just by “cybernetically” expanding on the rules of composition. Janáček’s purpose was to destroy this computer … My purpose is like Janáček’s: to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic word-spinning. Read More
April 13, 2021 Redux Redux: Come, Be My Camera 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. Suzan-Lori Parks. Photo courtesy of Parks. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about writing for the screen and stage versus the page. Read on for Suzan-Lori Parks’s Art of Theater interview, James Salter’s short story “The Cinema,” and Claribel Alegría’s poem “Documentary.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off. Suzan-Lori Parks, The Art of Theater No. 18 Issue no. 235 (Winter 2020) I love the process of writing. Whether it’s a TV script or a play, novel, song, or a film script, writing is all the same process. Just the rhythms are different. And where you have to begin and end is different. And how much you can see of a scene is different. What details you need to make a scene. In the novel, there are more words in those details. You can’t just say, “She’s tall and good looking.” You’ve got to let us know how so! Give me specifics. You’ve got to let us know how good looking she is. Read More
April 6, 2021 Redux Redux: A Man Says Yes without Knowing 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. Elizabeth Bishop. Photo: Alice Helen Methfessel. Courtesy of Frank Bidart. This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the release of Poets at Work, our latest anthology of interviews. Read on for work by three of the writers included in the book: Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Poetry interview, Ishmael Reed’s poem “The Diabetic Dreams of Cake,” and Pablo Neruda’s poem “Emerging.” You can also read Paris Review poetry editor Vijay Seshadri’s introduction to the book on the Daily. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off. Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Poetry No. 27 Issue no. 80 (Summer 1981) I can write prose on a typewriter. Not poetry. Nobody can read my writing so I write letters on it. And I’ve finally trained myself so I can write prose on it and then correct a great deal. But for poetry I use a pen. About halfway through sometimes I’ll type out a few lines to see how they look. Read More
March 30, 2021 Redux Redux: Her Perfume, Hermit-Wild 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. Ha Jin. Photo: © Dorothy Greco. This week at The Paris Review, we’re using our olfactory senses. Read on for Ha Jin’s Art of Fiction interview, Fleur Jaeggy’s story “Agnes,” and May Swenson’s poem “Daffodildo.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Ha Jin, The Art of Fiction No. 202 Issue no. 191 (Winter 2009) INTERVIEWER What do you remember most about your arrival in the United States? JIN There was a chemical smell here. It was very alien, very overwhelming. Also a lot of people wore perfume. I know a woman who came here from China and said she couldn’t stop vomiting. Read More
March 24, 2021 Redux Redux: The Clock Is Ticking 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. Antonella Anedda. Photo courtesy of Antonella Anedda Angioy. This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the return of spring. Read on for Antonella Anedda’s Art of Poetry interview, Souvankham Thammavongsa’s short story “The Gas Station,” and Diane di Prima’s poem “Song for Spring Equinox.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Antonella Anedda, The Art of Poetry No. 109 Issue no. 234 (Fall 2020) INTERVIEWER What is your earliest memory of poetry? ANTONELLA 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. Read More
March 16, 2021 Redux Redux: Montaigne Was Right 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. Notes from Elena Ferrante’s final revisions to The Story of the Lost Child. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about friendship, with its many complexities and joys. Read on for Elena Ferrante’s Art of Fiction interview, Ayşegül Savaş’s short story “Layover,” and Jana Prikryl’s poem “Friend.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Elena Ferrante, The Art of Fiction No. 228 Issue no. 212 (Spring 2015) The Neapolitan Novels didn’t have to make their way like the other stories in the frantumaglia. From the start I had the sensation, completely new for me, that everything was already in place. Maybe that was the result of the connection with The Lost Daughter. There, for example, the figure of Nina, the young mother who fascinates Leda, was already central. But it seems pointless to make a list of the more or less conscious connections that I see between my books. The theme of female friendship certainly has something to do with a childhood friend of mine, whom I wrote about some time ago in the Corriere della Sera, a few years after her death. That’s the first written trace of the friendship between Lila and Elena. And then I have a small private gallery—stories, luckily, unpublished—of uncontrollable girls and women, repressed by their men, by their environment, bold and yet weary, always a step away from disappearing into their mental frantumaglia. They converge in the figure of Amalia, the mother in Troubling Love—who shares many features with Lila, if I think about it, including a lack of boundaries. Read More