February 15, 2022 Redux Redux: Couples 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. Working at his place in the afternoon, and other notes from the archive on writing and romance. If you enjoy these free interviews, and the portfolio, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Interview Jane and Michael Stern, The Art of Nonfiction No. 8 Issue no. 215 (Winter 2015) INTERVIEWER When you started writing about road food, did you think it was of a piece with the folkways movement that was going on then? MICHAEL STERN If we didn’t at the start, we very quickly did. The year after Roadfood was published, we published Amazing America. And in Amazing America there are lots of folk-art environments and stuff like that. I think when we absolutely started, when Roadfood was called Truck Stoppin’, we weren’t thinking that it had anything to do with pop culture or folk art, but as soon as we got on the road and started finding guys like Howard Finster and that guy in Wisconsin— JANE STERN —the guy who collected— JANE AND MICHAEL STERN —the oil rags— MICHAEL STERN —not only did we very quickly realize that that was our passion, but I think it really helped us, in some way, to get a perspective on the food we were writing about. It wasn’t just truck-stop food. It was food that was a cultural phenomenon as well. Read More
February 8, 2022 Redux Redux: An Ordinary Word 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. The writer and translator Claudia Durastanti was born in the U.S. to Italian parents, both deaf, who never taught her to sign. She spent much of her young life shuttling between Brooklyn and Basilicata, and between the two countries’ native tongues. “When I write in English,” she told the Daily last week, “I’m making the reverse journey from the one I’m used to—English to Italian—so I’m obsessed with correctness. But then I don’t think it’s good writing. Usually, when you allow yourself impurities, the writing is actually stronger.” Read on for more from contributors to our archives who have journeyed between languages and nations: Dany Laferrière—the first Haitian and the first Quebecois to join the Académie française—on the nuances of the French dictionary; Beth Nguyen on her fractured relationship with her mother, who was left behind when the rest of the family immigrated to the U.S.; a wry poem by the hard-of-hearing, multilingual poet Ilya Kaminsky; and the Iranian-born Swiss photographer Shirana Shahbazi’s portraits of goftare nik (good words). 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 Dany Laferrière, The Art of Fiction No. 237 Issue no. 222 (Fall 2017) If a word that was used by Flaubert or Césaire falls into desuetude, if it becomes passé, we still keep it in the dictionary because it was used by an important writer. The dictionary strives to recognize the creative usage of writers. Our commission not long ago tackled the word sexe. So we looked at how writers use a word like sexe—all the different notions, phrases, and implications that have come up over the years. The Marquis de Sade doesn’t have the same thoughts on the matter as, say, the Marquise de Sévigné. An ordinary word can take up half a page in the dictionary. A word like sexe can run to six or seven pages. Read More
January 31, 2022 Redux Redux: Another Drink 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. “A crush goes nowhere,” Kathryn Davis writes on the Daily this week, in a piece adapted from her forthcoming memoir, Aurelia, Aurélia. “It’s called a crush because it’s like something landed on top of you, making movement impossible.” Still, who doesn’t love to nurture a crush every now and again? Flirtations, racing hearts, and fixations of all kinds certainly abound in our archive. Read on for Italo Calvino’s awkward habit of “falling in love with foreign words” as recalled by his translator William Weaver in an introduction to The Art of Fiction no. 130; dashed fantasies in “Rainbow Rainbow,” Lydia Conklin’s story of a teenage girl meeting her internet crush; Laurel Blossom’s sly poem “Plea to a Potential Lover”; and the photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta’s scenes of longing with accompanying text by Geoff Dyer. 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 Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction No. 130 Issue no. 124 (Fall 1992) Writers do not necessarily cherish their translators, and I occasionally had the feeling that Calvino would have preferred to translate his books himself. In later years he liked to see the galleys of the translation; he would make changes—in his English. The changes were not necessarily corrections of the translation; more often they were revisions, alterations of his own text. Calvino’s English was more theoretical than idiomatic. He also had a way of falling in love with foreign words. With the Mr. Palomar translation he developed a crush on the word feedback. He kept inserting it in the text and I kept tactfully removing it. I couldn’t make it clear to him that, like charisma and input and bottom line, feedback, however beautiful it may sound to the Italian ear, was not appropriate in an English-language literary work. Read More
January 26, 2022 Redux Redux: Functionally Insane 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 a new essay published on The Paris Review Daily, the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra explores how a lifetime of cluster headaches led him to seek relief in the hallucinogenic mushroom teonanácatl. He learns an important lesson: always wait before redosing. In the spirit of experimentation, this week’s Redux riffs on writing under the influence. Read on for Hunter S. Thompson’s hard-won advice about which drug a writer should avoid, in the Art of Journalism No. 1; a hazy afternoon in J. M. Holmes’s “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?”; Anne Waldman on the body as “just a bundle of drugs” in “How to Write”; Allen Ginsberg’s 1966 letter to the editor, regarding his experiences with LSD and psilocybin; and a portfolio of Nancy Friedemann’s loopy text-based drawings, as well as a sculpture. 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 Hunter S. Thompson, The Art of Journalism No. 1 Issue no. 156 (Fall 2000) INTERVIEWER How do you write when you’re under the influence? THOMPSON My theory for years has been to write fast and get through it. I usually write five pages a night and leave them out for my assistant to type in the morning. INTERVIEWER This, after a night of drinking and so forth? THOMPSON Oh yes, always, yes. I’ve found that there’s only one thing that I can’t work on and that’s marijuana. Even acid I could work with. The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane. Either you function or you don’t. Functionally insane? If you get paid for being crazy, if you can get paid for running amok and writing about it . . . I call that sane. Read More
January 18, 2022 Redux Redux: Conceptual Baggage 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. “The question,” writes Emmanuel Carrère in “Exhaling,” a new piece of prose in our Winter issue, “is whether there’s an incompatibility, or even a contradiction, between the practice of meditation and my trade, which is to write.” Carrère isn’t the first to explore meditation, and the tension between silence and setting down words, in The Paris Review. Read on for Charles Johnson’s youthful experiments in meditation in his Art of Fiction interview, a lecture by a famous Buddhist in Danielle Dutton’s short story “Somehow,” a sudden interruption at a Buddhist monastery in Marilyn Chin’s poem “Lantau,” and a return to mindfulness as you focus on Jacques Hérold’s portfolio of pen and ink drawings. 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 Charles Johnson, The Art of Fiction No. 239 Issue no. 224 (Spring 2018) Let’s start with the fact that fuzzy-bunny Buddhism doesn’t often talk about what it’s all really about—that it’s a preparation for death. Buddhism begins with that young prince leading his sheltered life and seeing the four signs. He sees an old man, he sees a sick man, he sees a dead man, and he sees a holy man. And he realizes unequivocally, categorically, That’s me. I’m going to get old, I’m going to get sick, and I’m going to die. So how do I deal with this? Buddhism is about letting go of a lot of conceptual baggage, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—you let that go and there’s a sense of liberation and clarity. Read More
January 11, 2022 Redux Redux: You Don’t Know You’ve Remembered 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. What were you up to in the seventies? Were you serving popcorn at Westland Twins cinema in LA, like Gary Indiana? Studying history at Dartmouth, like Annette Gordon-Reed? Hanging out at Club 57 on Saint Mark’s Place, like Scott Covert? Here at the Review, we’re looking back to the decade: a pivotal period for some of our recent contributors and the source of aesthetic inspiration for our redesign. To get into the mood, we’re unlocking a piece of experimental fiction by Pati Hill, Eudora Welty’s classic Art of Fiction interview, Paulé Bártón’s poem “The Sleep Bus,” and a series of drawings by the sculptor Claude Lalanne. 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 Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47 Issue no. 55 (Fall 1972) Once you have heard certain expressions, sentences, you almost never forget them. It’s like sending a bucket down the well and it always comes up full. You don’t know you’ve remembered, but you have. And you listen for the right word, in the present, and you hear it. Once you’re into a story everything seems to apply—what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you’re writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story. I guess you’re tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized—if you can think of your ears as magnets. Read More