April 23, 2019 Redux Redux: The One Who Outlives All the Cowards 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. Notes from Elena Ferrante’s final revisions to The Story of the Lost Child. In this week’s Redux, we’re reading the work of some of the authors featured in our new book, Writers at Work around the World. A celebration of global writers and literature in translation, the latest volume from Paris Review Editions features interviews with Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Ha Jin, and more. Read Elena Ferrante’s Art of Fiction interview, as well as Haruki Murakami’s short story “Heigh-Ho” and Jorge Luis Borges’s poem “The Thing I Am,” and then order your copy of Writers at Work around the World today! If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Elena Ferrante, The Art of Fiction No. 228 Issue no. 212 (Spring 2015) I publish to be read. It’s the only thing that interests me about publication. So I employ all the strategies I know to capture the reader’s attention, stimulate curiosity, make the page as dense as possible and as easy as possible to turn. But once I have the reader’s attention I feel it is my right to pull it in whichever direction I choose. I don’t think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn’t one. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones. Read More
April 16, 2019 Redux Redux: Everything Is a Machine 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. In this week’s Redux, we’re in a reflective mood. Read Wallace Stegner’s 1990 Art of Fiction interview, Joy Williams’s short story “Jefferson’s Beauty,” and Mary Jo Bang’s poem “Self-Portrait in the Bathroom Mirror.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Wallace Stegner, The Art of Fiction No. 118 Issue no. 115 (Summer 1990) I don’t think straitjackets are the way to get at fiction. I would rather define the novel as Stendhal did, as a mirror in the roadway. Whatever happens in the road is going to happen in the mirror too. Read More
April 9, 2019 Redux Redux: The Geography of Self and Soul 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. T. S. Eliot. Sketch by D. Cammell, 1959. In this week’s Redux, we’re celebrating National Poetry Month. Read our first-ever Art of Poetry interview, with T. S. Eliot, as well as Rita Dove’s poem “Stargazing” and Robert Creeley’s poem “The Mountains in the Desert.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. We’re holding a special National Poetry Month event in collaboration with the 92Y Poetry Center on Monday, April 29, featuring The Paris Review’s guest poetry editors—Henri Cole, Shane McCrae, Monica Youn, and Vijay Seshadri—and the poets Jericho Brown, Lawrence Joseph, Donika Kelly, and Evie Shockley. We hope to see you there! T. S. Eliot, The Art of Poetry No. 1 Issue no. 21 (Spring–Summer 1959) As a rule, with me an unfinished thing is a thing that might as well be rubbed out. It’s better, if there’s something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it’s in the memory it becomes transformed into something else. Read More
April 2, 2019 Redux Redux: Revelry 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. Deborah Eisenberg. Photograph courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In this week’s Redux, we’re reading the three writers we’ll be celebrating at our annual Spring Revel, with Hadada Award recipient Deborah Eisenberg’s 2013 Art of Fiction interview; Kelli Jo Ford’s short story “Hybrid Vigor,” winner of the 2019 Plimpton Prize for Fiction; and Benjamin Nugent’s short story “Safe Spaces,” winner of the 2019 Terry Southern Prize for Humor. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Deborah Eisenberg, The Art of Fiction No. 218 Issue no. 204 (Spring 2013) The real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There’s an incredibly inflexible set of instruments—our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it’s awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it’s so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time. Read More
March 26, 2019 Redux Redux: Desire Is Curled 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. In this week’s Redux, we’re remembering the work of the late W. S. Merwin and Linda Gregg with Merwin’s 1987 Art of Poetry interview and Gregg’s 1986 poem “After the Beginning.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. W. S. Merwin, The Art of Poetry No. 38 Issue no. 102 (Spring 1987) INTERVIEWER Do you see a connection between poetry and prayer? MERWIN I guess the simple answer is yes, if only because I think of poetry as an attempt to use language as completely as possible. And if you want to do that, obviously you’re not concerned with language as decoration, or language as amusement, although you certainly want language to be pleasurable. Pleasure is part of the completeness. I think of poetry as having to do with the completeness of life, and the completeness of relation with one’s experience, completing one’s experience, articulating it, making sense of it. Read More
March 19, 2019 Redux Redux: There’s No Trouble in Sleeping 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. Video still of Isaac Bashevis Singer, by Tetsuo Kogawa, 1977. This week, we’re looking back at work previously published in the Review from three contributors to our current issue: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1968 Art of Fiction interview, Peter Orner’s short story “Foley’s Pond,” and Carl Phillips’s poem “The Swain’s Invitation.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Art of Fiction No. 42 Issue no. 44 (Fall 1968) The problem is that it’s very hard to find a perfect equivalent for an idiom in another language. But then it’s also a fact that we all learned our literature through translation. Most people have studied the Bible only in translation, have read Homer in translation, and all the classics. Translation, although it does do damage to an author, it cannot kill him: if he’s really good, he will come out even in translation. And I have seen it in my own case. Also, translation helps me in a way. Because I go through my writings again and again while I edit the translation and work with the translator, and while I am doing this I see all the defects of my writing. Translation has helped me avoid pitfalls which I might not have avoided if I had written the work in Yiddish and published it and not been forced because of the translation to read it again. Read More