April 19, 2022 Redux Redux: All the Green Things Writhing 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. PHOTO COURTESY OF ANTONELLA ANEDDA ANGIOY. “Spring like a gun to the head,” Dorothea Lasky writes in a poem in our latest issue, “Green how I want you.” It’s been a strange, uncertain season, and now that the weather is turning and the cherry trees are beginning to blossom, we’re revisiting some works that evoke the cruelest month: an interview with the Italian poet Antonella Anedda; a story by Ira Sadoff that makes romancing a florist sound wistful yet thrilling; Elizabeth Brewster Thomas’s poem in which “beneath your feet a thousand spores of ice / blossom in darkness”; and a collaboration between Ben Lerner and the photographer Thomas Demand, featuring a profusion of paper flowers. (And if you pick up a copy of our Spring issue, you’ll also find collages by the late artist Birdie Lusch, who pasted newspaper clippings onto Hallmark catalogues to make her glorious bouquets.) 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 Poetry No. 109 Antonella Anedda 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. INTERVIEWER What was it that moved you? ANEDDA When I was seven, a member of my family, a person I loved, died in front of me. Suddenly her body was a thing without a voice. Listening to Blok’s poem—I was thirteen or fourteen—I thought that perhaps poetry could create a relationship with absence, with death, transposing the present into another space and time. From issue no. 234 (Fall 2019) Read More
April 12, 2022 Redux Redux: Like No One Else 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. Detail from Ghost. All drawings by Ed Ruscha. “I styled myself to look like no one else,” Jamaica Kincaid tells Darryl Pinckney in an Art of Fiction interview that appears in our new issue. “And I also knew I didn’t want to write like anyone else.” Tonight, at our first Spring Revel since 2019, we will present Kincaid with our lifetime achievement award, the Hadada, while Chetna Maroo will accept the Plimpton Prize for Fiction. To celebrate, we’re revisiting work by some of the recent prizewinners we were unable to honor in person: Jonathan Escoffery, who was awarded the Plimpton in 2020; Leigh Newman, recipient of that year’s Terry Southern Prize for “humor, wit, and sprezzatura”; and N. Scott Momaday, who accepted the Hadada last year. (And if you missed the story we unlocked last month by Eloghosa Osunde, winner of the 2021 Plimpton Prize, you can always make it right by subscribing.) We’re also including a 1987 portfolio of drawings by the chair of this year’s Revel, Ed Ruscha. If you enjoy these free short stories and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. POETRY Concession N. Scott Momaday Believe the sullen sense that sickness made, And broke you in its hands. Believe that death inhabits the mere shade Intimacy demands. From issue no. 99 (Spring 1986) Read More
April 5, 2022 Redux In Memoriam: Richard Howard 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. “The translator’s relation to his to-be-translated writer, or victim,” observed Richard Howard, the poet, translator, and longtime Paris Review poetry editor, in his 2004 Art of Poetry interview, “is essentially erotic and an exchange of mental fluids that cannot be entirely justified or explained.” Howard, who passed away last week at the age of ninety-two, won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection Untitled Subjects. His impact on American letters was immeasurable. He published, in addition to his many volumes of poetry, landmark translations of Charles Baudelaire, Roland Barthes, Emil Cioran, and André Gide, among others. You can find here an oral history of his life and work that appeared on the Daily in 2017, when he won our lifetime achievement award, the Hadada. This week, we’re unlocking his 2004 interview as well as his poem “On Tour,” his translation of Baudelaire’s “Parisian Dream,” and an excerpt from his translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, accompanied by a brief conversation with George Plimpton. As Craig Morgan Teicher, our digital director and a former student of Howard’s, writes, “To sit with him was to sit in the glorious eye of a thousand-year literary storm, to be guided through its currents, to be invited in.” If you enjoy these free interviews, poems, and translations, 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 Poetry No. 86 Richard Howard History and high culture were indeed my real home, and I found them right there in our house—in the library which became, indeed, my precocious playroom. Reading was an interior exile, so that I didn’t have to look away from home, as you put it, just further in. From issue no. 138 (Spring 1996) Read More
March 29, 2022 Redux Redux: The Best Time for Bad Movies 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. IMAGE VIA THE PARIS REVIEW ARCHIVES. PHOTOGRAPHS BELOW BY HILTON ALS. “With a picture that doesn’t work, no matter how stupid and how bad, they’re still going to try to squeeze every single penny out of it,” the legendary director Billy Wilder remarked in 1996, in the Review’s first-ever Art of Screenwriting interview. “You go home one night and turn on the TV and suddenly, there on television, staring back at you, on prime time, that lousy picture, that thing, is back!” How many filmmakers might have been quietly struggling with similar emotions on Sunday night? We wouldn’t want to speculate, but we certainly did tune in to the Oscars. This week, why not revel in the kind of old-school glamour that’s beyond good or bad? Deborah Eisenberg’s story “Taj Mahal” dissects a cast of Hollywood actors, directors, and other eccentrics; the poet Chase Twichell conjures the anarchic spirit of a darkened theater in the afternoon; and in words and a series of ravishing photographs, Hilton Als allows himself “to dream the kind of movie [he] would make” about James Baldwin, Nina Simone, and his late sister. And don’t miss Wilder’s account of what Claudette Colbert said to her director, Frank Capra, when they wrapped the film that won her the Academy Award … 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 Screenwriting No. 1 Billy Wilder I remember those days in New York when one writer would say to the other, I’m broke. I’m going to go to Hollywood and steal another fifty thousand. Moreover, they didn’t know what movie writing entailed. You have to know the rules before you break them, and they simply didn’t school themselves. I’m not just talking about essayists or newspapermen; it was even the novelists. None of them took it seriously … Pictures are something like plays. They share an architecture and a spirit. A good picture writer is a kind of poet, but a poet who plans his structure like a craftsman and is able to tell what’s wrong with the third act. What a veteran screenwriter produces might not be good, but it would be technically correct; if he has a problem in the third act he certainly knows to look for the seed of the problem in the first act. From issue no. 138 (Spring 1996) Read More
March 22, 2022 Redux Redux: Which Voice Is Mine 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. PHOTOGRAPH BY NANCY CRAMPTON. “Among the greatest pleasures of the Review’s Writers at Work series,” as our editor, Emily Stokes, wrote this week in a note introducing the Spring issue, “is the opportunity to eavesdrop on a revered author speaking intimately.” That sense that you’re eavesdropping is likewise often crucial to literature’s appeal. This week, we slip back into the archives to listen in on John Cheever’s 1976 Art of Fiction interview, in which he describes reading certain books as “finding myself at the receiving end of our most intimate and acute means of communication”; reencounter the young amateur spies of Joy Williams’s “A Story About Friends”; tune in to Laurance Wieder’s poem “The Seismographic Ear”; and rifle through Kathy Acker’s papers. If you enjoyed 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 Fiction No. 62 John Cheever INTERVIEWER One almost has a feeling of eavesdropping on your family in that book. CHEEVER The Chronicle was not published (and this was a consideration) until after my mother’s death. An aunt (who does not appear in the book) said, “I would never speak to him again if I didn’t know him to be a split personality.” From issue no. 67 (Fall 1976) Read More
March 15, 2022 Redux Redux: Vulnerable to an Epiphany 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. Each year, the Plimpton Prize for Fiction celebrates the work of an exceptional new writer appearing in the Review. In honor of this year’s winner, Chetna Maroo, we’re lifting the paywall on four previous recipients of the award, from the very first—Marcia Guthridge, for her story “Bones,” from issue no. 128 (Fall 1993)—to last year’s, Eloghosa Osunde, for “Good Boy,” from issue no. 234 (Fall 2020). If you enjoy these free stories, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. PROSE Bones Marcia Guthridge It is clear now that things were not quite normal with me. I was vulnerable to an epiphany. I needed a place to stand. From issue no. 128 (Fall 1993) Read More