July 13, 2016 Video & Multimedia Back to School with Nathaniel Mackey and Cathy Park Hong By The Paris Review Over the years, The Paris Review has joined with 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center to present an occasional series of live Writers at Work interviews. This April, poet Nathaniel Mackey sat for an onstage conversation with Cathy Park Hong. Read More
June 8, 2016 My First Time Helen DeWitt on The Last Samurai By Caitlin Love Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. This installment features Helen DeWitt, who discusses her debut novel, The Last Samurai, published in 2000. After seven years of writing unfinished novels, DeWitt decided to quit her job as a legal secretary and devote herself to finishing one book. “I thought, I just I have to quit until my money runs out … I’m going just to sit down and do nothing but work on this book, and I’m going to finish it in a month. Then I will have a finished book, and, see, it doesn’t matter what happens then.” Read More
June 6, 2016 Video & Multimedia George Plimpton on Muhammad Ali, the Poet By Dan Piepenbring In the clip above, our founding editor George Plimpton recalls hearing Muhammad Ali give a lecture to thousands of Harvard graduates, and the poem that emerged from it: He gave this wonderful speech … It was moving, it was funny at the same time, and there was a great roar of appreciation at the end of it. And then, someone shouted out, Give us a poem! Now the shortest poem in the English language, according to Bartlett’s Quotations, is called “On the Antiquity of Microbes.” And the poem is “Adam / Had ’em.” It’s pretty short. But Muhammad Ali’s poem was, “Me? / Whee!!” Two words. I wrote Bartlett’s Quotations and I said, Look here, that’s shorter than “Adam / Had ’em.” You wanna put it in? It stands for something more than the poem itself: Me, whee. What a fighter he was, and what a man. Read More
April 13, 2016 My First Time Jeffrey Eugenides on The Virgin Suicides By Dan Piepenbring Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. Today’s featured writer is Jeffrey Eugenides, who discusses his debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, published in 1993. (An early installment appeared in the Review’s Winter 1990 issue.) “I wrote two hours every night, and on the weekends I would spend four hours,” he says. “Each book that you write, you swim a long way from the piers at a certain point—you just don’t know what’s going to happen. If I learned anything with The Virgin Suicides, I just learned if you keep going, you’ll figure out how to shape the thing.” Be sure to watch the previous interviews in the series: Ben Lerner on The Lichtenberg Figures, his first collection Katori Hall on Hoodoo Love, her first play Donald Antrim on Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, his first novel Sheila Heti on The Middle Stories, her first collection Tao Lin on Bed, his first collection Christine Schutt on Nightwork, her first collection Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on his play Neighbors Gabrielle Bell on The Book of … series, her early cartoons J. Robert Lennon on his debut novel, The Light of Falling Stars
February 16, 2016 My First Time Ben Lerner on The Lichtenberg Figures By Sadie Stein “My First Time” is a video series in which we invite authors to discuss the trials of writing and publishing their first books. Consider it a chance to see how successful writers got their start, in their own words—it’s a portrait of the artist as a beginner and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. This installment stars Ben Lerner, poet and novelist. While an undergraduate at Brown—and later as an M.F.A. student—Lerner wrote the cycle of fifty-two sonnets that would become 2004’s The Lichtenberg Figures. At the time, he and roommate Cyrus Console were, says Lerner, “always writing under the sign of crisis … now when I look back, we had a kind of really intense practice.” He discusses the process of imposing form, his thematic inspirations, and the challenges of taking one’s place in the creative universe. “With the first book, you don’t really know if you can do it. You have a kind of constant anxiety about whether or not you have something to contribute to the conversation. And that anxiety—it can ruin your life, but it’s also really generative. Like, it’s a kind of discipline.” This series is made by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling; we’re delighted to collaborate with them. Be sure to watch the previous interviews in the series: Katori Hall, on Hoodoo Love, her first play Donald Antrim on Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, his first novel Sheila Heti on The Middle Stories, her first collection Tao Lin on Bed, his first collection Christine Schutt on Nightwork, her first collection Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on his play Neighbors Gabrielle Bell on The Book of … series, her early cartoons J. Robert Lennon on his debut novel, The Light of Falling Stars
November 18, 2015 My First Time Katori Hall on Hoodoo Love By Dan Piepenbring Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. Today’s featured writer is the playwright Katori Hall, whose American debut, Hoodoo Love, first appeared off Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 2007. “My First Time” will return with a new set of authors, including Ben Lerner, in a few months. In the meantime, be sure to watch the previous interviews in the series: Donald Antrim on Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, his first novel Sheila Heti on The Middle Stories, her first collection Tao Lin on Bed, his first collection Christine Schutt on Nightwork, her first collection Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on his play Neighbors Gabrielle Bell on The Book of … series, her early cartoons J. Robert Lennon on his debut novel, The Light of Falling Stars