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
March 8, 2022 Redux Redux: Of Continuous Change 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. ELIAS KHOURY, IN 2007. Elias Khoury began his 2017 Art of Fiction interview with the wry observation that “American reviewers read Arabic literature as if they’re reading the newspaper.” This week, we’re thinking—as we stare, helpless and sore-eyed, at our feeds—about the relationship between journalism and literature, and how artists, writers, and readers might respond to the news. Alongside Khoury’s interview, we revisit a short story by Stephen Minot, a Patricia Smith poem, and a portfolio of works from Peter and Annette Nobel’s collection of “press art.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and 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. 233 Elias Khoury INTERVIEWER How do you continue to write novels when every day seems to bring news of some new atrocity or human calamity in your backyard? KHOURY I’ve lived my life under a state of near permanent war. I was born in 1948 and have vivid memories of the “small” civil war of 1958. The defeat of 1967 brought me to political consciousness. And I began writing novels during the first years of our major civil war. I try not to write about war, but to write from within it. One has to write through these calamities and atrocities. I think it’s good practice—for writing and for living—but it isn’t ever easy. From issue no. 220 (Spring 2017) Read More
March 1, 2022 Redux Redux: 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. When Edward Hirsch spoke to Susan Sontag, in between her trips to Sarajevo, for a 1995 Art of Fiction interview, he noted that her work seemed “haunted by war.” She said, “I could answer that a writer is someone who pays attention to the world.” This week, we’re rereading a poem by Claribel Alegria and a story by Nadine Gordimer, looking back at a portfolio of the writer Ryszard Kapuściński’s photographs, watching the news, and considering what it means to pay attention. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and 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. 143 Susan Sontag I suppose it could seem odd to travel to a war, and not just in one’s imagination—even if I do come from a family of travelers. My father, who was a fur trader in northern China, died there during the Japanese invasion—I was five. I remember hearing about “world war” in September 1939, entering elementary school, where my best friend in the class was a Spanish Civil War refugee. I remember panicking on December 7, 1941. And one of the first pieces of language I ever pondered over was “for the duration”—as in “there’s no butter for the duration.” I recall savoring the oddity, and the optimism, of that phrase. From issue no. 137 (Winter 1995) Read More
February 22, 2022 Redux Redux: Literary Gossip 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 copyright © Laura Owens. In honor of the longtime friendship between BOMB and the Review, we’re offering a bundled subscription to both magazines until the end of February. Save 20% on a year of the best in art and literature—and for your weekly archive reading, a selection of authors that the two of us have each published over the years. Interview Gary Indiana, The Art of Fiction No. 250 Issue no. 238 (Winter 2021) I was desperate to write a novel, but I didn’t have a story. Whenever I tried to write fiction it was all about my own inner bullshit. Writing about films and architecture and books was never the end point of what I wanted to do, but it forced me to get outside my own head, to describe physical objects and action. And then somebody handed me a story. Read More