May 14, 2019 Redux Redux: Disappointment Is Oily 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. Eileen Myles. Photo: Shae Detar. This week at The Paris Review, we’re turning our attention to graduation season. Read Eileen Myles’s Art of Poetry interview, as well as David Lehman’s poem “Commencement” and Venita Blackburn’s short story “Fam.” 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. Eileen Myles, The Art of Poetry No. 99 Issue no. 214 (Fall 2015) If I had been a good student and an achiever, I might have been excited by a more systematic approach to writing than what I do. People loved to throw around the word rigorous in the eighties. I’d go bleh. When I started to pull something out of the pool of incoherence, it was exciting in itself. Read More
May 7, 2019 Redux Redux: I Fell In Love with the Florist 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. This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating that April’s showers have turned into May’s flowers. Read our Art of Fiction interview with Iris Murdoch, as well as Ira Sadoff’s short story “Seven Romances” and Dorothea Lasky’s poem “The Orange Flower.” 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. Iris Murdoch, The Art of Fiction No. 117 Issue no. 115 (Summer 1990) You have the extraordinary experience when you begin a novel that you are now in a state of unlimited freedom, and this is alarming. Every choice you make will exclude another choice, so that it’s rather important what happens then, what state of mind you’re in and what you think matters. Read More
April 30, 2019 Redux Redux: April in Paris 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. Sketch by Ivy Nicholson, 1956. This week, we’re listening to that old jazz standard “April in Paris” and reading Françoise Sagan’s Art of Fiction interview, as well as Zygmunt Haupt’s short story “In Paris and in Arcadia” and Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Parisian Dream.” 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. Françoise Sagan, The Art of Fiction No. 15 Issue no. 14 (Autumn 1956) I had read a lot of stories. It seemed to me impossible not to want to write one. Instead of leaving for Chile with a band of gangsters, one stays in Paris and writes a novel. That seems to me the great adventure. Read More
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