April 24, 2018 Redux Redux: Excessive Doom Scenarios 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. Sunday was Earth Day, but before you head outside to explore the wonders of nature, linger a moment with The Paris Review. This week, we bring you Gary Snyder’s Art of Poetry interview, in which he urges us to love the world; Roger Salloch’s story “Romantic Landscape”; and Mark Strand’s poem “After Our Planet.” Gary Snyder, The Art of Poetry No. 74 Issue no. 141 (Winter 1996) I feel that the condition of our social and ecological life is so serious that we’d better have a sense of humor. That it’s too serious just to be angry and despairing. Also, frankly, the environmental movement in the last twenty years has never done well when it threw out excessive doom scenarios. Doom scenarios, even though they might be true, are not politically or psychologically effective. The first step, I think, and that’s why it’s in my poetry, is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world. Make us love the world, which means the nonhuman as well as the human, and then begin to take better care of it. Read More
April 17, 2018 Redux Redux: The Taxman Cometh 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. Today is tax day, but right now it’s time to put aside your W-2s, forget about your adjusted gross income, and take a break with The Paris Review. This week, we bring you Derek Walcott’s Art of Poetry interview, in which he argues for state support of artists; Richard Stern’s “Audit,” a revenge tale featuring a lisping IRS agent; and Frederick Seidel’s aptly named poem “Widening Income Inequality.” Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37 Issue no. 101 (Winter 1986) I’m fifty-five now and all my life I’ve tried to fight and write and jeer and encourage the idea that the state owes its artists a lot. When I was young it looked like a romance; now that I’m older and I pay taxes, it is a fact. But not only do I want roads, I want pleasure, I want art. Read More
April 10, 2018 Redux Redux: A Poem Is a Suitcase 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. It’s National Poetry Month, so this week, we bring you … poetry: our 2008 Art of Poetry interview with Kay Ryan; Simon Worrall’s feature on literary forgery, “Emily Dickinson Goes to Las Vegas”; and Caroline Knox’s poem “Sleepers Wake.” Read More
April 3, 2018 Redux Redux: On Rising from the Dead 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 we bring you Blaise Cendrars’s Art of Fiction interview, in which he remembers the Easter Sunday he wrote Les Pâques à New-York, one of the founding texts of modern poetry; Leonard Gardner’s story of summer’s promise, “Christ Has Returned to Earth and Preaches Here Nightly”; and Carolyn Kizer’s poem “On Rising from the Dead.” Read More
March 27, 2018 Redux Redux: A Mild Olfactory Hallucination 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. It’s officially spring, right? This week, we help to hasten winter’s end with a story of knowing when to stop, from John Hall Wheelock’s interview; Ben Lerner’s appropriately named story “False Spring”; and, a staff favorite, Diane di Prima’s poem “Song for Spring Equinox,” in which we see the season’s “slightly boring” side. Read More
March 20, 2018 Redux Redux: Celebrating Joy 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. At our Spring Revel this year, we will present Joy Williams with the Hadada, our lifetime-achievement award. To celebrate, we’re unlocking her Art of Fiction interview; “The Retreat,” her first story published in the Review; and her beloved story “Marabou.” And don’t forget, the Spring Revel will be held on Tuesday, April 3. Purchasing a ticket helps support The Paris Review Foundation and our mission to publish great writing. Joy Williams, The Art of Fiction No. 223 Issue no. 209 (Summer 2014) “What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.” Read More