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.

Deborah Eisenberg. Photograph courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

In this week’s Redux, we’re reading the three writers we’ll be celebrating at our annual Spring Revel, with Hadada Award recipient Deborah Eisenberg’s 2013 Art of Fiction interview; Kelli Jo Ford’s short story “Hybrid Vigor,” winner of the 2019 Plimpton Prize for Fiction; and Benjamin Nugent’s short story “Safe Spaces,” winner of the 2019 Terry Southern Prize for Humor.

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.

Deborah Eisenberg, The Art of Fiction No. 218
Issue no. 204 (Spring 2013)

The real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There’s an incredibly inflexible set of instruments—our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it’s awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it’s so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time.

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