December 11, 2018

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.

Adam Phillips.

This week, we bring you Adam Phillips’s 2014 Art of Nonfiction interview, Geoff Dyer’s essay “Into the Zone,” and Robyn Selman’s poem “Essay in the Form of a Russian Doll.”

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.

Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7
Issue no. 208 (Spring 2014)

An essay is a mixture of the conversational and the coherent and has, to me, the advantages of both. There doesn’t have to be a beginning, a middle, and an end, as there tends to be in a short story. Essays can wander, they can meander. Also, the nineteenth-century essayists whom I like, like Emerson and Lamb and Hazlitt, are all people who are undogmatic but very moralistic, though it’s not quite clear what that moralism is. That’s to say, they are clearly people of very strong views who are trying not to be fanatical. The essay is very rarely a fanatical form, it seems to me, partly because you’d just run out of steam. It would just be propaganda of the most boring sort. In order to write a compelling essay, you have to be able to change tone. I think you also have to be reflexively self-revising. It’s not that these things are impossible in other genres, but they’re very possible in essays. As the word essay suggests, it’s about trying something out, it’s about an experiment. From the time I began writing—although this wasn’t conscious—I think that was the tradition I was writing in.

December 4, 2018

Redux

Redux: The Famous Sideshow

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.

Marguerite Yourcenar, ca. 1983. Courtesy Nationaal Archief Fotocollectie Anefo.

This week, we bring you Marguerite Yourcenar’s 1988 Art of Fiction interview, Maxine Kumin’s short story “Another Form of Marriage,” and John Ashbery’s poem “Weed Commercial.”

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.

Marguerite Yourcenar, The Art of Fiction No. 103
Issue no. 106 (Spring 1988)

One lives in a commercialized society against which one must struggle. But it is not easy. As soon as one is dealing with the media one becomes their victim. But have we really lost the sense of the sacred? I wonder! Because unfortunately in the past the sacred was intricately mixed with superstition, and people came to consider superstitious even that which was not. For example, peasants believed that it was better to sow the grain at full moon. But they were quite right: That is the moment when the sap rises, drawn by gravitation. What is frightening is the loss of the sacred in human, particularly sexual, relationships, because then no true union is possible.

November 27, 2018

Redux

Redux: The Shopping Mall of Loss

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.

Carolyn Kizer.

This week, we bring you Carolyn Kizer’s Art of Poetry interview, Doug Trevor’s short story “St. Francis in Flint,” and Debora Greger’s poem “To the Fifties.”

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.

Carolyn Kizer, The Art of Poetry No. 81
Issue no. 154 (Spring 2000)

Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing. Also, male artists always have had the qualities that modern women find lacking in most men; these guys know how to cook, change a diaper, take responsibility for entertaining and educating their children. Of course part of this is due to economics: most good painters are poor. But mainly it’s because they are tactile, earthy; like Antaeus, they have their feet firmly in the dirt.

November 20, 2018

Redux

Redux: The Old Juices Flowing

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.

Barry Hannah.

This week, we bring you Barry Hannah’s 2004 Art of Fiction interview, Hollis Summers’s short story “Mister Joseph Botts,” and John Ashbery’s poem “The Ritz Brothers on Moonlight Bay.”

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.

Barry Hannah, The Art of Fiction No. 184
Issue no. 172 (Winter 2004)

My aunts told wonderful stories. Not to me, but to each other. We had a very strong family. My mother’s sisters loved each other intensely. The uncles loved each other intensely. Those were the days when it meant something to travel, when people were still grinning because you could drive a car over a hundred miles. So when they got together they really narrated. Children were supposed to be quiet, so we’d all go to bed, but I’d still hear these stories going into the night and people’s laughter. It was a delightful way to go to sleep on Christmas or Thanksgiving.

November 6, 2018

Redux

Redux: You Only Vote Once in a While

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.

Arthur Miller.

This week, we bring you Arthur Miller’s 1966 Art of Theater interview, Wang Meng’s short story “The Stubborn Porridge,” and Martha Hollander’s poem “Election Night.”

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.

Arthur Miller, The Art of Theater No. 2
Issue no. 38 (Summer 1966)

I always drew a lot of inspiration from politics, from one or another kind of national struggle. You live in the world even though you only vote once in a while. It determines the extensions of your personality. I lived through the McCarthy time, when one saw personalities shifting and changing before one’s eyes, as a direct, obvious result of a political situation. And had it gone on, we would have gotten a whole new American personality—which in part we have … Such a pall of fright was laid upon us that it truly deflected the American mind. It’s part of a paranoia which we haven’t escaped yet. Good God, people still give their lives for it; look what we’re doing in the Pacific.

October 30, 2018

Redux

Redux: James Merrill’s Ouija Board

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.

James Merrill.

This week, we bring you James Merrill’s Art of Poetry interview, in which he explains how he draws inspiration from a Ouija board; “The Plato Club,” a strange feature in which Merrill and David Jackson use a Ouija board to contact Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Colette, Jean Genet, and others; and “Totem,” a poem by Eamon Grennan.

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.

James Merrill, The Art of Poetry No. 31
Issue no. 84 (Summer 1982)

INTERVIEWER

Does the Ouija board ever manifest maniacal tendencies? Do you ever feel yourself lost in its grip?

MERRILL

Oh, we’ve been scared at times. A friend who sat with us at the board just once went on to have a pretty awful experience with some people out in Detroit. She was told to go west, and to sail on a certain freighter on a certain day, and the name of the island where she’d meet her great-grandmother reincarnated as a Polynesian teenager who would guide her to a mountain cave where in turn an old man . . . and so forth. Luckily she collapsed before she ever made it to California.