September 25, 2018 Redux Redux: The Wind Flakes Gold-Leaf from Trees 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. Embracing fall equinox, we bring you George Seferis’s 1970 Writers at Work interview, where he speaks to the roles of conscious and subconscious memory in poetic imagery; Edmund White’s short story “The Secret Order of Joy”; and Jane Hirshfield’s poem “Autumn.” George Seferis, The Art of Poetry No. 13 Issue no. 50 (Fall 1970) When autumn approached, when there would be a rather strong wind, and the fishing barges would have to sail through rough weather, we would always be glad when they were at last anchored, and my mother would say to someone among the fishermen who’d gone out: “Ah, bravo, you’ve come through rough weather”; and he would answer: “Madam, you know, we always sail with Charon at our side.” That’s moving to me. Perhaps when I wrote about Ulysses in “Upon a Foreign Verse”—perhaps I had in mind somebody like that fisherman. Those “certain old sailors from my childhood” who would recite the Erotokritos. Read More
September 18, 2018 Redux Redux: Brooklyn Crossing 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. On Sunday, the staff of The Paris Review was at the Brooklyn Book Festival, hawking our wares and slinging subscriptions. For those of you who live too far away to have stopped by our booth, we bring you David McCullough’s 1999 Art of Biography interview, where he recounts how he began writing his book The Great Bridge; Jonathan Lethem’s story “Tugboat Syndrome,” whose protagonist “grew up in the library of St. Vincent’s Home for Boys in downtown Brooklyn”; and Pam A. Parker’s poem “Brooklyn Crossing.” David McCullough, The Art of Biography No. 2 Issue no. 152 (Fall 1999) One day I was having lunch in a German restaurant on the Lower East Side with an architect-engineer and a science writer. They started talking about what the builders of the Brooklyn Bridge didn’t know when they started it. The more they talked, the more I realized I had found my subject. I had lived in Brooklyn Heights and walked over the bridge many times; the Roeblings came from my part of Pennsylvania and I knew something about them because they plotted the course of the Pennsylvania Railroad through Johnstown. I left the restaurant and went straight to the Forty-second Street library and climbed those marble stairs to the third floor as if I had a jet engine on my back. There were over a hundred cards on the Brooklyn Bridge, but none described a book of the kind I had already begun blocking out in my mind. I went to Peter Schwed, my editor at Simon and Schuster, and said, I’ve got my next book. Read More
September 11, 2018 Redux Redux: Such Is the Way with Monumental Things 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, to celebrate his work as the guest poetry editor of the Fall issue, we bring you selections of work by Henri Cole: his 2014 Art of Poetry interview, in which he outlines what he requires from a good poem; “West Point Remembered,” from the Fall 1988 issue, Cole’s first appearance in our pages; and the poem “At the Grave of Elizabeth Bishop.” Henri Cole, The Art of Poetry No. 98 Issue no. 209 (Summer 2014) I think it would be rather narrow—and moralistic—to say that poetry must comfort us and point to what is good. I don’t think that is the function of art, though sometimes it is a happy result. In any case, a sentimental, moralizing poem is not what I want to write. I don’t want the reader to experience comfort—I want the opposite. Read More
September 4, 2018 Redux Redux: If You Can Hoe Corn for Fifty Cents an Hour … 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. Yesterday was Labor Day, so this week, we bring you Jim Harrison’s Art of Fiction interview, Richard Yates’s short story “A Wrestler with Sharks,” and Henri Coulette’s “The Blue-Eyed Precinct Worker.” Jim Harrison, The Art of Fiction No. 104 Issue no. 107 (Summer 1988) If you can hoe corn for fifty cents an hour, day after day, you can learn how to write a novel. You have absorbed the spirit of repetition. When you look at my wife’s garden you understand that; the beauty of the garden—the flowers and the vegetables—that’s how an artist is in his work. And I think the background that at first nonplussed me—that rural, almost white-trash element—stood me in good stead as an artist, in the great variety of life it forced me into, the hunger to do things. Read More
August 21, 2018 Redux Redux: V. S. Naipaul 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 remembrance of V. S. Naipaul, who died August 11 at age eighty-five, we bring you his 1998 Art of Fiction interview, his short story “My Aunt Gold Teeth,” and Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea Is History.” V. S. Naipaul, The Art of Fiction No. 154 Issue no. 148 (Fall 1998) People can live very simple lives, can’t they? Tucked away, without thinking. I think the world is what you enter when you think—when you become educated, when you question—because you can be in the big world and be utterly provincial. Read More
August 14, 2018 Redux Redux: Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover 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. Blast into The Paris Review’s archive with Allen Ginsberg’s 1966 Art of Poetry interview, where he recounts his spacey hallucinations; Robert Olen Butler’s story “ ‘Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover’ ”; and Cynthia Zarin’s poem “Saturn.” Read More