June 5, 2018 Redux Redux: Celebrating Pride Month 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 Pride Month, we bring you our 1988 Art of Fiction interview with Edmund White, Garth Greenwell’s short story “Gospodar,” and Sappho’s poem “Prayer to Aphrodite.” Edmund White, The Art of Fiction No. 105 Issue no. 108 (Fall 1988) It was a political act for me to sign The Joy of Gay Sex at the time. The publisher could not have cared less, but for me it was a big act of coming out. Charles Silverstein, my coauthor, and I were both aware that we would be addressing a lot of people and so in that sense we were spokesmen. We always pictured our ideal reader as someone who thought he was the only homosexual in the world. States of Desire was an attempt to see the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people—to show that gays aren’t just hairdressers, they’re also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks. Once I’d written States of Desire I felt it was important to show one gay life in particular depth, rather than all of these lives in a shorthand version. Read More
May 29, 2018 Redux Redux: Philip Roth (1933–2018) 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. Philip Roth, a longtime friend and an early contributor to the magazine, died last week at age eighty-five. Roth’s influence on American letters is staggering, and it didn’t take long for the remembrances, appreciations, and obituaries to pour in from every publication imaginable. This week, to honor Roth, we bring you his Art of Fiction interview, from our Fall 1984 issue; his novella Goodbye, Columbus, from our Autumn–Winter 1958–1959 issue; and a special bonus episode of our podcast, where we share a recording of Roth’s speech from our 2010 Revel, when he was given the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement. Read More
May 22, 2018 Redux Redux: Tom Wolfe, Barbara Grossman, and Gwyneth Lewis 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. Tom Wolfe, New York City, November 2011 Tom Wolfe died last week, at eighty-eight. So today, we bring you his Art of Fiction interview. We also bring you Barbara Grossman’s tale about a young man and his house plants, “My Vegetable Love,” and Gwyneth Lewis’s poem about Florida titled “Pentecost.” Read More
May 15, 2018 Redux Redux: Reading About Mom 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. Happy Mother’s Day! This week, read Nadine Gordimer’s Art of Fiction interview to learn why her mother would say, “Now, take it slowly, remember your heart”; Lorrie Moore’s story “Terrific Mother,” about a woman who is too often told she would be one; and Paul Carroll’s poem “Mother.” Read More
May 8, 2018 Redux Redux: Emily’s Other Daffodil 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 help you usher in the month of May with a bouquet of archival reads. Learn about John Fowles’s wild-orchid hobby in his Art of Fiction interview; follow the hunt for a flatware pattern in Belle Boggs’s story “Imperial Chrysanthemum”; and read May Swenson’s Emily Dickinson–inspired poem “Daffodildo.” Read More
May 1, 2018 Redux Redux: The Story of the Story 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 Lorrie Moore’s Art of Fiction interview, Rachel Kushner’s story “Blanks,” and Kevin Young’s poem “Homage to Phillis Wheatley.” Lorrie Moore, The Art of Fiction No. 167 Issue no. 158 (Spring–Summer 2001) If one loves stories, then one would naturally love the story of the story. Or the story behind the story, pick your preposition. It does seem to me to be a kind of animal impulse almost, a mammalian curiosity. For a reader to wonder about the autobiography in a fiction may be completely unavoidable and in fact may speak to the success of a particular narrative, though it may also speak to its failure. Certainly literature has been written about and taught in this manner for a long time; it’s not new. It is sometimes, however, like so many things that are natural, unfortunate. Read More