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.

Ishmael Reed, 2015.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re marking the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death on September 14. Read on for Ishmael Reed’s Art of Poetry interview, Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s “Identity Check,” Evie Shockley’s “ex patria,” and a translation of Dante Alighieri himself by Robert Pinsky.

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.

Ishmael Reed, The Art of Poetry No. 100
Issue no. 218 (Fall 2016)

With literature you can condemn the powerful, and you can critique the power­ful. Of course, Dante paid for it. He was never able to return to Florence. He died in exile. He endured a lot to speak his mind. They tell us, Don’t write about politics. You know, because the politics is aimed at them. But Dante had a political office! And some of those characters in Dante’s Inferno are political opponents of his. The same with Shakespeare. His work was political. I was reading The Merchant of Venice the other day and it includes one of the most devastating antislavery arguments ever written. So I don’t know where they get the bourgeois idea that art shouldn’t be political.

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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.

John McPhee, ca. 2009. Photograph courtesy of the Princeton University Office of Communications.

This week at The Paris Review, it’s back to school. Read on for John McPhee’s Art of Nonfiction interview, Shanteka Sigers’s short story “A Way with Bea,” and Melanie Rehak’s poem “Self-Portrait as the Liberal Arts.”

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.

John McPhee, The Art of Nonfiction No. 3
Issue no. 192 (Spring 2010)

Writers develop slowly. That’s what I want to say to you: don’t look at my career through the wrong end of a telescope. This is terribly important to me as a teacher of writers, of kids who want to write.

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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.

Toni Morrison, ca. 2008. Photo: Angela Radulescu.

This week at The Paris Review, as summer winds down, we’re thinking about endings. Read on for Toni Morrison’s Art of Fiction interview, Steven Millhauser’s short story “Flying Carpets,” and Alex Dimitrov’s poem “Impermanence.”

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. Or, take advantage of this last week of our summer bundle and purchase a year’s worth of The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for $99.

Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134
Issue no. 128 (Fall 1993)

INTERVIEWER

What about plot? Do you always know where you’re going? Would you write the end before you got there?

MORRISON

When I really know what it is about, then I can write that end scene. I wrote the end of Beloved about a quarter of the way in. I wrote the end of Jazz very early and the end of Song of Solomon very early on. What I really want is for the plot to be how it happened. It is like a detective story in a sense. You know who is dead and you want to find out who did it.

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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.

Louise Erdrich.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about masks, concealment, and hiding. Read on for Louise Erdrich’s Art of Fiction interview, Charles Baudelaire’s poem “The Mask,” Donald Keene’s essay on Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, and Flavia Gandolfo’s photography portfolio “Masks.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and works of criticism, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books and read both magazines’ entire archives?

Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208
Issue no. 195 (Winter 2010)

I suppose one develops a number of personas and hides them away, then they pop up during writing. The exertion of control comes later. I take great pleasure in writing when I get a real voice going and I’m able to follow the voice and the character. It’s like being in a trance state.

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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.

Margaret Jull Costa. Photo: © Gary Doak / Alamy Stock Photo.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re highlighting women writers and translators from around the world in honor of Women in Translation Month. Read on for Margaret Jull Costa’s Art of Translation interview, Hiromi Kawakami’s short story “Mogera Wogura,” Claribel Alegria’s poem “Summing Up,” and Svetlana Alexievich’s work of nonfiction “Voices from Chernobyl.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and works of criticism, why not subscribe to both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books and read both magazines’ entire archives?

Margaret Jull Costa, The Art of Translation No. 7
Issue no. 233 (Summer 2020)

Translating is writing, and I see no distinction, really, between being a writer and being a translator, apart from the very major distinction that I don’t start with a blank page but immerse myself in another writer’s words and transpose them into my own language. People often ask if I don’t yearn to write my own novels, and I don’t. I don’t have that kind of storytelling imagination. Just as actors don’t all yearn to write plays or musicians to compose symphonies, I enjoy the process of interpretation and performance, of conveying someone else’s words and ideas to a new audience. Not that I’m a neutral voice, that’s not possible, but, if all goes well, I’m the writer’s voice with a different cadence. Read More

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.

Robert Lowell. Drawing by Hans Beck, 1961.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating another year of the best deal in town: our summer subscription offer with The New York Review of Books. For only $99, you’ll receive yearlong subscriptions and complete archive access to both magazines—a 34% savings!

To give you a taste, we’re unlocking pieces from the archives of both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books. Read on for Robert Lowell’s Art of Poetry interview, paired with his letters to Elizabeth Bishop concerning the founding of The New York Review of Books; Ingeborg Bachmann’s short story “Everything,” paired with Merve Emre’s essay on Bachmann’s novel Malina and other fiction; and a portfolio of art by Kara Walker, paired with an essay by Zadie Smith on Walker’s work through the years.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and works of criticism, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books and read both magazines’ entire archives?

Robert Lowell, The Art of Poetry No. 3
The Paris Review, issue no. 25 (Winter–Spring 1961)

The ideal modern form seems to be the novel and certain short stories. Maybe Tolstoy would be the perfect example—his work is imagistic, it deals with all experience, and there seems to be no conflict of the form and content. So one thing is to get into poetry that kind of human richness in rather simple descriptive language. Then there’s another side of poetry: compression, something highly rhythmical and perhaps wrenched into a small space. I’ve always been fascinated by both these things.

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