February 19, 2019 Redux Redux: Miles of Mostly Vacant Lots 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. Toni Morrison, ca. 2008. Photograph by Angela Radulescu. This week, we’re celebrating Toni Morrison’s birthday with her 1993 Art of Fiction interview, observing Presidents’ Day with Philip Levine’s poem “A Walk with Tom Jefferson,” and delving deep into the archive to retrieve Gisela Elsner’s short story “A Pastoral.” 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. Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134 Issue no. 128 (Fall 1993) I don’t trust my writing that is not written, although I work very hard in subsequent revisions to remove the writerly-ness from it, to give it a combination of lyrical, standard, and colloquial language. To pull all these things together into something that I think is much more alive and representative. But I don’t trust something that occurs to me and then is spoken and transferred immediately to the page. Read More
February 12, 2019 Redux Redux: Nouns Like Desire 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. This week, in honor of Valentine’s Day, we bring you Simone de Beauvoir’s 1965 Art of Fiction interview; Clarice Lispector’s short story about stealing roses, “One Hundred Years of Forgiveness”; and Carl Phillips’s poem “Youth with Satyr, Both Resting.” 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. Simone de Beauvoir, The Art of Fiction No. 35 Issue no. 34 (Spring–Summer 1965) INTERVIEWER None of your female characters are immune from love. You like the romantic element. DE BEAUVOIR Love is a great privilege. Real love, which is very rare, enriches the lives of the men and women who experience it. Read More
February 5, 2019 Redux Redux: A Game of Touch Football in a Snowstorm 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. Don DeLillo, ca. 2011. Photo: Thousandrobots. This week, we bring you Don DeLillo’s 1993 Art of Fiction interview, the first installment of Chris Bachelder’s novel The Throwback Special, and Greg Kosmicki’s poem “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. Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction No. 135 Issue no. 128 (Fall 1993) There’s a zone I aspire to. Finding it is another question. It’s a state of automatic writing, and it represents the paradox that’s at the center of a writer’s consciousness—this writer’s anyway. First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there’s a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger. The best moments involve a loss of control. It’s a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often—completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages—I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do. In End Zone, a number of characters play a game of touch football in a snowstorm. There’s nothing rapturous or magical about the writing. The writing is simple. But I wrote the passage, maybe five or six pages, in a state of pure momentum, without the slightest pause or deliberation. Read More
January 29, 2019 Redux Redux: The Seismographic Ear 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, we bring you Alice Munro’s 1994 Art of Fiction interview, Shelley Jackson’s short story “Husband,” and Laurance Wieder’s poem “The Seismographic Ear.” 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. Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137 Issue no. 131 (Summer 1994) The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn’t fail. That it might is the danger. This may be the beast that’s lurking in the closet in old age—the loss of the feeling that things are worth doing. Read More
January 22, 2019 Redux Redux: Mary Oliver and Francine du Plessix Gray 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, we bring you our 1987 Art of Fiction interview with Francine du Plessix Gray, who died on January 13 at age eighty-eight, and “The Swan,” a poem by Mary Oliver, who died last Thursday at age eighty-three. 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. Francine du Plessix Gray, The Art of Fiction No. 96 Issue no. 103 (Summer 1987) Our lifetime friendships can be more steadfast and trustworthy than any marriage, and considerably more treasurable. Those few persons whom I gained as friends before the age of twenty-five, for example. Nothing they would ever say or do would diminish my love and esteem for them. It’s as if they were grafted upon me. Read More
January 15, 2019 Redux Redux: Spellbinders 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. Joyce Cary. This week, we bring you Joyce Cary’s 1954 Art of Fiction interview, Carolyn Gaiser’s short story “Differences,” and David Wagoner’s poem “Photographing Snakes.” 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. Joyce Cary, The Art of Fiction No. 7 Issue no. 7 (Fall–Winter 1954–1955) Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul—politics does the same thing for the body. Of course they overlap—this is a very rough description. But the politician is responsible for law, for physical security, and in a world of tumult, of perpetual conflict, he has the alternatives, roughly again, of persuading people or shooting them. In the democracies, we persuade. And this gives great power to the spellbinder, the artist in words, the preacher, the demagogue, whatever you call him. Rousseau, Marx, Tolstoy, these were great spellbinders … Poets have started most of the revolutions, especially nationalist revolutions. On the other hand, life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders. Read More