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
January 5, 2022 Redux Redux: Great Blinding Flashes 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. Photos courtesy of Killarnee, Wikimedia Commons It’s the very first week of 2022, so you can probably guess the theme of this Redux. Whether you spent New Year’s Eve setting off fireworks or having a road to Damascus moment, we hope you gave 2021 a good kick in the shins. Unlocked for you to read in these first days of the year: our interview with Octavio Paz, an excerpt from Rachel Cusk’s Transit, a poem by Catherine Davis, and party snapshots by Andy Warhol. 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 Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry No. 42 Issue no. 119 (Summer 1991) I am very fond of fireworks. They were a part of my childhood. There was a part of the town where the artisans were all masters of the great art of fireworks. They were famous all over Mexico. To celebrate the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, other religious festivals, and at New Year’s, they made the fireworks for the town. I remember how they made the church façade look like a fiery waterfall. It was marvelous. Mixoac was alive with a kind of life that doesn’t exist anymore in big cities. Read More
December 21, 2021 Redux Redux: Furry Faces 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. When we at the Review first read Sterling HolyWhiteMountain’s story “This Then Is a Song, We Are Singing,” which is published in our new Winter issue, we found ourselves in thrall to the story’s narrator—who, for all of his rage and confusion, self-justification and delusion, is undeniably charismatic. Inspired by the pleasure we took in spending time in his company (at least on the page), we hunted through the archives for some of the most memorable—which is to say, memorably off-kilter—voices the Review has published over the years. Inevitably, this led us to our Art of Fiction interview with Marguerite Young, whose hallucinatory novel Miss Macintosh, My Darling is, in her words, “an inquest into the illusions individuals suffer from.” From the same issue, no. 71 (Fall 1977), there are two poems by Erica Jong in which a lonely narrator putters around, talking to her cat. We’ve also been sucked into John Edgar Wideman’s stream of consciousness in “Sightings,” and fascinated by the inscrutable portraits of Llyn Foulkes. 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 Marguerite Young, The Art of Fiction No. 66 Issue no. 71 (Fall 1977) It was the unconscious that interested me. I say that I am not interested in people, but I am interested in the bizarre and in people at an edge. I am interested in extreme statements about people because that is where drama is most apparent. Read More
December 14, 2021 Redux Redux: Naked Lightbulb 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 the seventies, Gary Indiana found himself swept up in the experimental film and theater scenes of West Germany and New York City. “When I performed I had—and this maybe had something to do with how much I drank—a quality of demonic abandon,” he recalls in his Art of Fiction interview in our Winter issue, in which he describes the influence of directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Schroeter on his novels. Of course, the page, the stage, and the screen have always been bedfellows. To celebrate these intimate relationships, we’re unlocking August Wilson’s Art of Theater interview, James Salter’s short story “The Cinema,” Charles Simic’s poem “Mystery Theater,” an excerpt from Claudia Rankine’s play Help, and a portfolio of work by Ken Lum inspired by TV. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Interview August Wilson, The Art of Theater No. 14 Issue no. 153 (Winter 1999) I don’t write for a production. I write for the page, just as I would with a poem. A play exists on the page even if no one ever reads it aloud. I don’t mean to underestimate a good production with actors embodying the characters, but depending on the readers’ imagination they may get more by reading the play than by seeing a weak production. Read More