March 3, 2020 Redux Redux: Monologue for an Onion 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. Jane and Michael Stern at home in Connecticut in 1975, with the manuscript of the first edition of Roadfood. This week at The Paris Review, we’re weeping over the alliums in our archive. Read on for Jane and Michael Stern’s Art of Nonfiction interview, Aleksandar Hemon’s short story “Fatherland,” and Sue Kwock Kim’s poem “Monologue for an Onion.” 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 don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast! Jane and Michael Stern, The Art of Nonfiction No. 8 Issue no. 215 (Winter 2015) We were eating in all these road-food places, which didn’t have a name then. There wasn’t the concept of “road food”—there were just these little mom-and-pop cafés, and we kept a little notebook of these places. Read More
February 25, 2020 Redux Redux: Pull the Language in to Such a Sharpness 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. Maya Angelou. This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating Black History Month by highlighting African American writers in our archive. Read on for Maya Angelou’s Art of Fiction interview, Edward P. Jones’s short story “Marie,” and Toi Derricotte’s poem “Peripheral.” 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 don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast! Maya Angelou, The Art of Fiction No. 119 Issue no. 116 (Fall 1990) I try to pull the language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy. Of course, there are those critics—New York critics as a rule—who say, Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language. Read More
February 18, 2020 Redux Redux: My Prose Was from the Heart 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. Simone de Beauvoir. Valentine’s Day may be long past, but this week at The Paris Review, we’re still preoccupied with the wretchedness of desire. Read on for Simone de Beauvoir’s Art of Fiction interview, Akhil Sharma’s short story “The Well,” and Randall Mann’s poem “Evidence.” 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 don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast! Simone de Beauvoir, The Art of Fiction No. 35 Issue no. 34 (Spring–Summer 1965) DE BEAUVOIR Love is a great privilege. Real love, which is very rare, enriches the lives of the men and women who experience it. INTERVIEWER In your novels, it seems to be the women—I’m thinking of Françoise in She Came to Stay and Anne in The Mandarins—who experience it most. DE BEAUVOIR The reason is that, despite everything, women give more of themselves in love because most of them don’t have much else to absorb them. Perhaps they’re also more capable of deep sympathy, which is the basis of love. Perhaps it’s also because I can project myself more easily into women than into men. My female characters are much richer than my male characters. Read More
February 11, 2020 Redux Redux: Film Is Death at Work 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. Billy Wilder. This week at The Paris Review, we’re watching some flicks, some pictures, some movies. Read on for Billy Wilder’s Art of Screenwriting interview, Hernan Diaz’s short story “The Stay,” and Chase Twichell’s poem “Bad Movie, Bad Audience.” 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 don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast! Billy Wilder, The Art of Screenwriting No. 1 Issue no. 138 (Spring 1996) I used stars wherever I could in Sunset Boulevard … The picture industry was only fifty or sixty years old, so some of the original people were still around. Because old Hollywood was dead, these people weren’t exactly busy. They had the time, got some money, a little recognition. They were delighted to do it. Read More
February 4, 2020 Redux Redux: Knowing It Would End 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. Charles Johnson in his office, with his grandson Emery, 2016. This week at The Paris Review, we’re preoccupied by questions of impermanence and longing. Read on for Charles Johnson’s Art of Fiction interview, Joy Williams’s short story “Tricks,” and Alex Dimitrov’s poem “Impermanence.” 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 don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast! Charles Johnson, The Art of Fiction No. 239 Issue no. 224 (Spring 2018) Take Marcus Aurelius—Meditations got me through Stony Brook University. I’m a Ph.D. candidate, with the pressures of teaching undergraduates, passing my own graduate classes, my qualifying exam, and living in 1975 on my four-thousand-dollar assistantship, with a first child on the way, no job yet, and a second philosophical novel to complete that had to be more expansive than the first one. Meditations got me through because Marcus Aurelius understood suffering, impermanence, and death almost as well as a Zen master. And Plato once said that philosophy is really preparation for death. I extend that wisdom to our very notion of the self as an enduring entity. You let go of the things that are simply unnecessary. Read More
January 28, 2020 Redux Redux: I Lost the Time of Day about Three Weeks Ago 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. Elizabeth Bishop. Photo: Alice Helen Methfessel. Courtesy of Frank Bidart. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about the art of losing. Read on for Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Poetry interview, Hebe Uhart’s short story “Coordination,” and Terry Stokes’s poem “Losing the Time of Day.” 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 don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast. Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Poetry No. 27 Issue no. 80 (Summer 1981) INTERVIEWER Have you ever had any poems that were gifts? Poems that seemed to write themselves? BISHOP Oh, yes. Once in a while it happens. I wanted to write a villanelle all my life but I never could. I’d start them but for some reason I never could finish them. And one day I couldn’t believe it—it was like writing a letter. Read More