January 8, 2019 Redux Redux: A Secret Mouth 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. Wallace Stegner. This week, we bring you Wallace Stegner’s 1990 Art of Fiction interview, Virginia Harabin’s story “Saturday, Sunday,” and Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Memory Cave.” 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. Read More
December 18, 2018 Redux Redux: Brushfire at Christmas 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 Jim Crace’s 2003 Art of Fiction interview, Andrew Martin’s short story “With the Christopher Kids,” and Judy Longley’s poem “Brushfire at Christmas.” 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. Read More
December 11, 2018 Redux Redux: Reflexively Self-Revising 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. Adam Phillips. This week, we bring you Adam Phillips’s 2014 Art of Nonfiction interview, Geoff Dyer’s essay “Into the Zone,” and Robyn Selman’s poem “Essay in the Form of a Russian Doll.” 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. Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7 Issue no. 208 (Spring 2014) An essay is a mixture of the conversational and the coherent and has, to me, the advantages of both. There doesn’t have to be a beginning, a middle, and an end, as there tends to be in a short story. Essays can wander, they can meander. Also, the nineteenth-century essayists whom I like, like Emerson and Lamb and Hazlitt, are all people who are undogmatic but very moralistic, though it’s not quite clear what that moralism is. That’s to say, they are clearly people of very strong views who are trying not to be fanatical. The essay is very rarely a fanatical form, it seems to me, partly because you’d just run out of steam. It would just be propaganda of the most boring sort. In order to write a compelling essay, you have to be able to change tone. I think you also have to be reflexively self-revising. It’s not that these things are impossible in other genres, but they’re very possible in essays. As the word essay suggests, it’s about trying something out, it’s about an experiment. From the time I began writing—although this wasn’t conscious—I think that was the tradition I was writing in. Read More
December 4, 2018 Redux Redux: The Famous Sideshow 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. Marguerite Yourcenar, ca. 1983. Courtesy Nationaal Archief Fotocollectie Anefo. This week, we bring you Marguerite Yourcenar’s 1988 Art of Fiction interview, Maxine Kumin’s short story “Another Form of Marriage,” and John Ashbery’s poem “Weed Commercial.” 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. Marguerite Yourcenar, The Art of Fiction No. 103 Issue no. 106 (Spring 1988) One lives in a commercialized society against which one must struggle. But it is not easy. As soon as one is dealing with the media one becomes their victim. But have we really lost the sense of the sacred? I wonder! Because unfortunately in the past the sacred was intricately mixed with superstition, and people came to consider superstitious even that which was not. For example, peasants believed that it was better to sow the grain at full moon. But they were quite right: That is the moment when the sap rises, drawn by gravitation. What is frightening is the loss of the sacred in human, particularly sexual, relationships, because then no true union is possible. Read More
November 27, 2018 Redux Redux: The Shopping Mall of Loss 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. Carolyn Kizer. This week, we bring you Carolyn Kizer’s Art of Poetry interview, Doug Trevor’s short story “St. Francis in Flint,” and Debora Greger’s poem “To the Fifties.” 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. Carolyn Kizer, The Art of Poetry No. 81 Issue no. 154 (Spring 2000) Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing. Also, male artists always have had the qualities that modern women find lacking in most men; these guys know how to cook, change a diaper, take responsibility for entertaining and educating their children. Of course part of this is due to economics: most good painters are poor. But mainly it’s because they are tactile, earthy; like Antaeus, they have their feet firmly in the dirt. Read More
November 20, 2018 Redux Redux: The Old Juices Flowing 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. Barry Hannah. This week, we bring you Barry Hannah’s 2004 Art of Fiction interview, Hollis Summers’s short story “Mister Joseph Botts,” and John Ashbery’s poem “The Ritz Brothers on Moonlight Bay.” 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. Barry Hannah, The Art of Fiction No. 184 Issue no. 172 (Winter 2004) My aunts told wonderful stories. Not to me, but to each other. We had a very strong family. My mother’s sisters loved each other intensely. The uncles loved each other intensely. Those were the days when it meant something to travel, when people were still grinning because you could drive a car over a hundred miles. So when they got together they really narrated. Children were supposed to be quiet, so we’d all go to bed, but I’d still hear these stories going into the night and people’s laughter. It was a delightful way to go to sleep on Christmas or Thanksgiving. Read More