December 15, 2020 Redux Redux: Morning Full of Voices 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. Stephen Sondheim. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This week, The Paris Review is humming a little tune. Read on for Stephen Sondheim’s Art of the Musical interview, Sigrid Nunez’s “The Blind” (the first chapter of her novel The Friend), and Eamon Grennan’s poem “Musical Interlude.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!). And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. Stephen Sondheim, The Art of the Musical Issue no. 142, Spring 1997 Some lyrics read well because they’re conversational lyrics. Oscar’s do not read very well because they’re colloquial but not conversational. Without music, they sound simplistic and written. Yet it’s precisely the hypersimplicity of the language that gives them such force. If you listen to “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’ ” from Carousel, you’ll see what I mean. Read More
December 8, 2020 Redux Redux: A Point of Coincidence 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. This week, The Paris Review is celebrating the release of the Winter 2020 issue by highlighting three contributors who have appeared in previous issues. Read on for Claudia Rankine’s Art of Poetry interview, György Dragomán’s short story “End of the World,” and Arthur Sze’s poem “Streamers.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!). And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. Claudia Rankine, The Art of Poetry No. 102 Issue no. 219, Winter 2016 The question is, How do you get to an authentic emotional place? I’m often listening not for what is being told to me but for what resides behind the narrative. What is the feeling for the thing that’s being told to me? One of the reasons I work in book-length projects, instead of individual poems, is because I don’t trust the authenticity of any given moment by itself. Read More
December 1, 2020 Redux Redux: A Little Bedtime Story 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. Samuel R. Delany. Photo: Samuel R. Delany. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. This week, The Paris Review is feeling leisurely and lethargic and embracing the idea of daydreams. Read on for Samuel R. Delany’s Art of Fiction interview, Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s short story “Honeymoon,” and Mary Jo Bang’s poem “Q Is the Quick.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!). And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210 Issue no. 197, Summer 2011 DELANY Today I’m a five-o’clock-in-the-morning riser. Although I do stare at the wall a lot. INTERVIEWER Stare at the wall? DELANY I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently. My daughter, who recently graduated from medical school, once told me, “Dad, I’ve never known anyone who works as hard as you. You’re up at four, five o’clock in the morning, you work all day, then you collapse. At nine o’clock, you’re in bed, then you’re up the next morning at four to start all over again.” Gide says somewhere that art and crime both require leisure time to flourish. I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that’s how people perceive me, they have to say I’m prolific. But I don’t find that either complimentary or accurate. Read More
November 24, 2020 Redux Redux: A Dining Room Deserted 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. Derek Walcott, ca. 2012. Photo: Jorge Mejía Peralta. This week, The Paris Review approaches this strange and lonely holiday season with a feeling of gratitude. Read on for Derek Walcott’s Art of Poetry interview, Nick Fuller Googins’s short story “The Doors,” and Pablo Neruda’s poem “Melancholy inside Families.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!). And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37 Issue no. 101, Winter 1986 Ultimately, it’s what Yeats says: “Such a sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at everything and everything we look upon is blessed.” That’s always there. It’s a benediction, a transference. It’s gratitude, really. The more of that a poet keeps, the more genuine his nature. I’ve always felt that sense of gratitude. I’ve never felt equal to it in terms of my writing, but I’ve never felt that I was ever less than that. Read More
November 17, 2020 Redux Redux: You Would If 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. José Saramago. Photo: Sampinz at Italian Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. This week, The Paris Review is celebrating the birthdays of three different writers. Read on for José Saramago’s Art of Fiction interview, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “The Murderer,” and Margaret Atwood’s poem “Frogless.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!). And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. José Saramago, The Art of Fiction No. 155 Issue no. 149, Winter 1998 In the end, I am quite normal. I don’t have odd habits. I don’t dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don’t talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer’s block, all those things that we hear about writers. I don’t have any of those problems, but I do have problems just like any other person doing any other type of work. Sometimes things do not come out as I want them to, or they don’t come out at all. When things do not come out as well as I would have liked, I have to resign myself to accepting them as they are. Read More
November 10, 2020 Redux Redux: The Feeling of an Airplane Crashing 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. Kurt Vonnegut, ca. 1972. Photo: PBS. This week, The Paris Review is thinking about Veterans Day. Read on for Kurt Vonnegut’s Art of Fiction interview, M. F. Beal’s short story “Veterans,” and Jim Carroll’s poem “Traffic.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!). And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction No. 64 Issue no. 69, Spring 1977 VONNEGUT I said, By God, I saw something after all! I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me. INTERVIEWER That sort of shifted the whole focus … VONNEGUT She freed me to write about what infants we really were: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. We were baby-faced, and as a prisoner of war I don’t think I had to shave very often. I don’t recall that that was a problem. Read More