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.

Janet Malcolm. Photo: © Nina Subin.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about distance, travel, and all the vacations we’re not taking this summer. Read on for Janet Malcolm’s Art of Nonfiction interview, Alejandro Zambra’s short story “Long Distance,” and Kenneth Koch’s poem “To the French Language.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. 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.

Janet Malcolm, The Art of Nonfiction No. 4
Issue no. 196 (Spring 2011)

Well, the most obvious attraction of quotation is that it gives you a little vacation from writing—the other person is doing the work. All you have to do is type.

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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.

Iris Murdoch.

A couple of weeks ago, the Redux brought you April showers; now we’re delivering the obligatory May flowers. Read on for Iris Murdoch’s Art of Fiction interview, Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Funes the Memorious,” and Eileen Myles’s poem “Circus.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. 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.

Iris Murdoch, The Art of Fiction No. 117
Issue no. 115 (Summer 1990)

INTERVIEWER

Which tends to come first—characters or plot?

MURDOCH

I think they all start in much the same way, with two or three people in a relationship with a problem. Then there is a story, ordeals, conflicts, a movement from illusion to reality, all that. I don’t think I have any autobiographical tendencies and can’t think of any novel I’ve written that is a copy of my own life.

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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.

Alice Munro.

This week at The Paris Review, in honor of Mother’s Day, we’re thinking of motherhood and children and the work behind parenting. Read on for Alice Munro’s Art of Fiction interview, Lorrie Moore’s short story “Terrific Mother,” and Camille Dungy’s poem “The Average Mother Now Spends Twice as Many Hours on Childcare as Did Her Counterpart in 1965, and She Also Spends Three Times as Many Hours Working Outside the Home; or, How to Sing a Song of Sixpence When You’re Really Feeling Wry.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. 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.

Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137
Issue no. 131 (Summer 1994)

INTERVIEWER

Doesn’t any young artist, on some level, have to be hard-hearted?

MUNRO

It’s worse if you’re a woman. I want to keep ringing up my children and saying, Are you sure you’re all right? I didn’t mean to be such a . . . Which of course would make them furious because it implies that they’re some kind of damaged goods. Some part of me was absent for those children, and children detect things like that. Not that I neglected them, but I wasn’t wholly absorbed. When my oldest daughter was about two, she’d come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other. I’ve told her that. This was bad because it made her the adversary to what was most important to me. I feel I’ve done everything backwards: this totally driven writer at the time when the kids were little and desperately needed me. And now, when they don’t need me at all, I love them so much. I moon around the house and think, There used to be a lot more family dinners.

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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.

Gabriel García Márquez.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re inspired by the adage “April showers bring May flowers” and the constant rain falling here in New York. Read on for Gabriel García Márquez’s Art of Fiction interview, Lydia Davis’s short story “The Seals,” and John Tranter’s poem “Rain.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. 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.

Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69
Issue no. 82 (Winter 1981)

When I was working for El Espectador in Bogotá, I used to do at least three stories a week, two or three editorial notes every day, and I did movie reviews. Then at night, after everyone had gone home, I would stay behind writing my novels. I liked the noise of the Linotype machines, which sounded like rain. If they stopped, and I was left in silence, I wouldn’t be able to work.

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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.

Carl Phillips in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 2018. Photo courtesy of Reston Allen.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re closing out National Poetry Month with a celebration of the poets in our archive. Read on for Carl Phillips’s Art of Poetry interview; “Eclogue,” a rare piece of prose from May Swenson; and Nin Andrews’s poem “Poets on Poets.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. 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.

Carl Phillips, The Art of Poetry No. 103
Issue no. 228 (Spring 2019)

I tell people, especially if I’m giving a reading, it’s okay to let the words wash over them, the way one experiences abstract art. I’m not trained in visual art. I often see things in a museum and don’t know what to make of them, but I still have an experience, a response to what I can see. Likewise, I don’t think poems have to have easy translation. I believe strongly in emotional and psychological narratives. I think of many of my poems as emotional gestures. Context isn’t always essential—or maybe it’s that I resist context as an absolute. I like what happens when context begins to wobble a bit.

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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.

Marilynne Robinson.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re embracing hermitism. Read on for Marilynne Robinson’s Art of Fiction interview, Rick Bass’s short story “The Hermit’s Story,” and Karen Solie’s poem “A Hermit.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. 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.

Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction No. 198
Issue no. 186 (Fall 2008)

INTERVIEWER

When you were little, what did you think you’d be when you grew up?

ROBINSON

Oh, a hermit? My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work. There we were in this tiny town in Idaho, and he was like Alexander dividing up the world: I’ll be the painter, you’ll be the poet.

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