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.

Samuel R. Delany in his New York City apartment in 1983.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re dreaming of other worlds, and highlighting writers of speculative and science fiction. Read on for Samuel R. Delany’s Art of Fiction interview, an epilogue chapter to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, and Margaret Atwood’s poem “Frogless,” paired with photos from Richard Kalvar’s series “Earthlings.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

Interview
Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210
Issue no. 197 (Summer 2011)

INTERVIEWER

Do you think of yourself as a genre writer?

DELANY

I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing. Thus I write more than most people, and I write in many different forms. I think of myself as the kind of person who writes, rather than as one kind of writer or another. That’s about the closest I come to categorizing myself as one or another kind of artist.

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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.

Welty, ca. 1962, Wikimedia Commons

This week at The Paris Review, we’re waiting for the bus and descending into the subway. Read on for Eudora Welty’s Art of Fiction interview, Gish Jen’s short story “Amaryllis,” and Frank O’Hara’s poem “Corresponding Foreignly,” paired with a portfolio of photographs by G. M. B. Akash.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also 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.

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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.

KENZABURO OE IN 2002.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re highlighting work from some of the more than thirty Nobel laureates in our archive, in honor of the Nobel Prize in Literature announcement last Thursday. Read on for Kenzaburo Oe’s Art of Fiction interview, Alice Munro’s short story “Spaceships Have Landed,” an excerpt from Naguib Mahfouz’s novel The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, and Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “Negative.”

Interview
Kenzaburo Oe, The Art of Fiction no. 195
Issue no. 183 (Winter 2007)

The Nobel Prize is almost meaningless to one’s literary work, but it raises one’s profile, one’s status as a social figure. One earns a kind of currency that one can use in a much wider realm. But for the author, nothing changes. My opinion of myself didn’t change. There are only a few writers who have gone on to produce good work after winning the Nobel Prize. Thomas Mann is one. Faulkner also.

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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.

PHOTO © OLIVIER ROLLER (DETAIL); MANUSCRIPT IMAGE COURTESY OF GALAXIA GUTENBERG

This week at The Paris Review, we’re writing about reading, and reading about writing. Read on for Enrique Vila-Matas’s Art of Fiction interview, Kate Zambreno’s short story “Plagiarism,” a piece of fiction by Chekhov called “What You Usually Find in Novels,” Gevorg Emin’s poem “The Block,” and a portfolio of Richard Prince art from 1978.

Interview
Enrique Vila-Matas, The Art of Fiction No. 247
Issue no. 234 (Fall 2020)

The kind of writer I like best is the one who has, at some stage, been a critic, and who at a certain point realizes that if he really wanted to honor literature he must immediately himself become a writer—step inside the bullring and prolong, by other means, what was always at stake in literature.

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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 His Analysands’ Chair, 2000.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about psychoanalysis and the interpretation of dreams. Read on for Adam Phillips’s Art of Nonfiction interview, an excerpt from Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend, Joanna Scott’s short story “A Borderline Case,” and Mark Scott’s poem “Freudian Tenderness,” as well as selections from a 1984 portfolio of Louise Bourgeois drawings.

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

Psychoanalytic sessions are not like novels, they’re not like epic poems, they’re not like lyric poems, they’re not like plays—though they’re rather like bits of dialogue from plays. But they do seem to me to be like essays, nineteenth-century essays. There is the same opportunity to digress, to change the subject, to be incoherent, to come to conclusions that are then overcome and surpassed, and so on.

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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.

Ali Smith, with Leo, in Cambridge, 2003.

This week at The Paris Review, the leaves are changing, the air is cooling, and the autumn equinox approaches. Read on for Ali Smith’s Art of Fiction interview, Robert Walser’s work of fiction “From the Essays of Fritz Kocher,” and Reginald Shepherd’s poem “A Muse.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

Ali Smith, The Art of Fiction No. 236
Issue no. 221 (Summer 2017)

INTERVIEWER

Were you pleased to see Autumn referred to as “the first serious Brexit novel”?

SMITH

Indifferent. What’s the point of art, of any art, if it doesn’t let us see with a little bit of objectivity where we are? All the way through this book I’ve used the step-back motion, which I’ve borrowed from Dickens—the way that famous first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities creates space by being its own opposite—to allow readers the space we need to see what space we’re in.

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