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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Anne Carson.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the launch of the Spring issue by featuring a few contributors who have appeared in previous issues of the magazine. Read on for Anne Carson’s Art of Poetry interview, Allan Gurganus’s short story “Art History (From An Only Modestly Good Translation),” and Forrest Gander’s poem “Body Visible.”

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.

Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry No. 88
Issue no. 171 (Fall 2004)

One thing I do understand about the Greeks is that they, too, understood otherness and valued it. That is what the god Dionysus is as a principle—the principle of being up against something so other that it bounces you out of yourself to a place where, nonetheless, you are still in yourself; there’s a connection to yourself as another. It’s what they call ecstasy.

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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.

Italo Calvino.

Spring may be around the corner, but this week, we’re taking one last look at winter. Read on for Italo Calvino’s Art of Fiction interview, Deborah Love’s story “One Winter,” and Rohan Chhetri’s poem “New Delhi in Winter.”

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.

Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction No. 130
Issue no. 124 (Fall 1992)

By then I had reached a level of obsession with structure such that I almost became crazy about it. It can be said about If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler that it could not have existed without a very precise, very articulated structure. I believe I have succeeded in this, which gives me a great satisfaction. Of course, all this kind of effort should not concern the reader at all. The important thing is to enjoy reading my book, independently of the work I have put into it.

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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.

George Saunders. Photo: Chloe Aftel. Courtesy of George Saunders.

This week, we’re looking at some of the writers whom both The Paris Review and BOMB Magazine have published in the past. Read on for George Saunders’s Art of Fiction interview, Renee Gladman’s essay “Five Things,” and Cathy Park Hong’s poem “Happy Days.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not take advantage of our current subscription offer with BOMB Magazine? Until the end of February, subscribe and save on both of these New York magazines, bringing you the best in literary and visual arts, for only $62.

George Saunders, The Art of Fiction No. 245
Issue no. 231 (Winter 2019)

My view of myself is that I came in through the basement window of literature. I’m not well educated or well read enough to do things correctly, and when I write what seems to me a “correct” story, it’s got low energy and isn’t true to my experience. Somehow the story and the language have to be a little messy or low. I love the idea of pushing an idea through a too-small linguistic opening—that feeling of overflow. I love the idea that the passion contained in a story is so great that it fucks up the form and makes it unseemly and impolite.

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