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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 .   To celebrate the release of the Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold , we bring you our 1978 Art of Fiction interview with the writer —plus a Halloween ghost story from William Faulkner and a haunted poem by Matthew Zapruder . Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71 Issue no. 74 (Fall–Winter 1978) I grew up in a dangerous landscape. I think people are more affected than they know by landscapes and weather. Sacramento was a very extreme place. It was very flat, flatter than most people can imagine, and I still favor flat horizons. The weather in Sacramento was as extreme as the landscape. There were two rivers, and these rivers would flood in the winter and run dry i...

“ Mother Mold ,” an exhibition of sculptural portraiture by Keith Edmier, is running at the Petzel Gallery, on Sixty-Seventh Street, until November 4. The fifty masks draw inspiration from  imagines , a type of wax casting that aristocratic families made of their male members’ faces and displayed in their homes during the Roman Republic. “In an age before photography,  imagines   were considered the truest, most objective representation of a person.” Unlike the Romans, Edmier makes his masks from plaster, and includes female faces. “Some of these people are famous, some are not. Some casts were made by me, others were not. Some people I knew intimately, others I knew casually or never met. Edmier’s  imagines  is a lifeline or, possibly, a dysfunctional family tree of my own.” The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of the  imagines as a boxed set of fifty postcards ,  written by Edmier himsel...

Still from Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse  (1922).   When it comes to ghosts, belief and outright disbelief are not the only options—or at least they weren’t in nineteenth-century Britain. The Victorians didn’t stick to simple arguments about the existence of ghosts; they also argued about how, when, and why they might exist. Spiritualists attacked spiritualists over whether the supernatural should be classed as natural. Scientists discussed whether psychological or physiological factors were at play. Inventors, politicians, journalists and madmen joined in, too. Indeed, it was such a popular, multidisciplinary pursuit that its practitioners needed new places to meet, outside of their existing societies, and various organizations were established to debate the boundaries of the immaterial. One of these exploratory committees was the Ghost Club. It was founded in 1862 and lasted about a decade, although its history stretches back to a group of Cambridge academics in the 1850...

Still from Two Thousand Maniacs!   Years ago, my boyfriend and I drove from New York City, where he was from, to Orlando, where I was from and where we were both attending an old liberal-arts college rich in bats and mossy oaks. South, past the Mason–Dixon Line and into the Carolinas, we went. We were speeding on a forsaken stretch of I-95 late one night when the rearview mirror glinted blue and red. I would have pulled over immediately. But I was not behind the wheel. Nick did not want to stop until there were witnesses. I didn’t grasp his fear: we were a couple of law-abiding white kids en route to school at the end of summer. What did he imagine was going to happen to us? But he drove for more than five minutes—ignoring my advice (so that I pondered whether to phone my dad or his when we went to jail)—before halting in a semi-bright parking lot, switching the radio to country music, and dropping the window. Nick recalls the state trooper as a seven-footer with a g...

1. The house vomits everything a family has accumulated over three decades. Appliances, utensils, tchotchkes, forgotten photographs, important documents—everything has to be packed away. Everything impinges on them, whining to be replaced, put back out of sight, left alone. As we make piles to help my partner’s parents sort through their effects the day before their kitchen will be demoed, his father stumbles across a basket full of books— Native Son catches my eye. Uncle, can I have it? He glances at the book, wondering why he’s still holding onto it. My partner’s parents have reached the end of their patience. It would be simpler to throw everything away, rather than figure out what’s worth saving. As more books resurface, uncle says, Rajat, you want this ; I’m not sure whether it’s a question. The next day, my partner bristles at the books I cart home from the Performing Arts library, a few blocks from our apartment. I hold them the way my school librarian showed my third-grad...

Out this week:  The King Is Always Above the People  by  Daniel Alarcón ;  In the Midst of Winter   by  Isabel Allende ;  The Kites   by  Romain Gary ;  Blood Brothers   by  Deanne Stillman ;  The Art of Loading Brush   by  Wendell Berry ; and a new edition of our own  Garth Risk Hallberg’s  A Field Guide to the North American Family .  For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview . The post Tuesday New Release Day: Alarcón; Allende; Gary; Stillman; Berry; Hallberg appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2iiFwBB

Oh! Africa Land of the blessed Oh! Africa We are the best Oh! Africa Gifted amongst all Oh! Africa Delight of them all Oh! Africa Dwelling of the strong Oh! Africa Bravely we throng Oh! Africa Strongest amongst human race Oh! Africa Peaceful and a loving place Oh! Africa My mother land Oh! Africa my … Continue reading Africa → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2gPKGVq

Call it a cuisine, a delicacy or a dish or better still serve it at breakfast, at lunch or at dinner time; the cravings for it lingers on. It is the antidote to a crying baby, a muse to the labourers that work 9 to 5 and the first request of every worked up father … Continue reading Man shall not live by bread alone → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2gQy4xA

Did it rain? Did it pour? Does the water shed Amidst this humble planet With every male, child and female Display their parachute In glowing colours With rivers roaring along Their streamlined courses Pulling everything along their path A water race to join their ocean buddies Fishes having their field day As the rains drum … Continue reading Did It Rain? → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2iiJSZR

“Christ” he heard himself say and hurriedly climbed out of the bed to stop her. He stared at her unable to believe how far she was taking the whole thing. “What in God’s name makes you think I want to have sex with you?”      “Surely I have to pay you” she replied. “Sales … Continue reading Love Gone Wrong 4 → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2ltVr51

    Voom! Voom!, the phone vibrates as it moves to the sound it produce, wandering around on the bed like one indecisive on where to go. After few seconds, it stopped. The screeching fan continued its cry, running slowly like babies crawling in chase of themselves. Voom! Voom!! The indecisive wandering phone continued in … Continue reading Skint By Theo-ziny Joel → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2yhKIAD

this is the house we were made. a house papa and mama’s colors joined together. we have the map of this building in our palms, we could not allow it to exile us like the tortoise who exiled its shell in times of trouble to the unknown. we grew around its brokenness and shame. we … Continue reading House Of Symbols. → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2luVCwT

On witches, Derrida, and the impossibility of ever being truly known.  John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle , 1886. The inquisitors wanted something old from each witch they tortured—a Sabbath orgy or blood oath or cat demon or wolf-faced baby or some other verification of the stories they already believed. They also wanted something new, so they could feel, with each trial and execution, as if they were getting somewhere: With what instruments do you fly? What did the toad in the pot say? Which direction do you turn the horseshoe over the door to summon your demon? According to Joseph Glanvill’s 1681 volume Saducismus triumphatus, or, Full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions in two parts: the first treating of their possibility, the second of their real existence , the convicted witch Elizabeth Styles’s offering to the investigators in 1664 was that her demon sucked blood. He came to her often. Even when she was tied up in a dungeon, still he came ...

The best part about The New Yorker’s summer flash fiction series is that The New Yorker did a summer flash fiction series. The magazine had already published some of my favorites, including Raymond Carver’s “Chef’s House” and George Saunders’s “ Adams .” And flash is an awesome genre with a lot of fans, but doesn’t get too much love in big publications. The worst part about The New Yorker’s summer flash fiction series is that if you blinked you missed it. I happened to see the first installment of the series (“ Elevator Pitches ” by Jonathan Lethem ) by accident on my daily perusal of the homepage, but none of the other stories were featured there during the rest of the summer. So what could have been heightened visibility for the genre became a hidden corner for the hardcore. And I mean hardcore, because “Elevator Pitches” is not even the best story in the series and would certainly not convert a skeptic. As for the 10 stories themselves, they vary from the anaphoric nostalgia...

Renwick Smallpox Hospital. Photo: Andre Costantini   To drive up FDR Drive—on Manhattan’s east side, on a slick cold night—is to find solitude. You edge between island and water like a cell in a vein. To the left, streets reach like facades to a vanishing point. Buildings of stone and steel and glass, illuminated from within, look like cave drawings depicting our humanity and its dystopia. Row by row and by the thousands, people in a furious, confused sequence are stacked atop one another. They work or eat or drown in the blue light of televisions. The city is illuminated like it’s the world’s carnival, and this can inspire an isolating sentimentality of being abandoned to the future, when humanity has built then ruined everything and itself, when it is left without want and is poorer for it. It is not as cynical as it sounds. These are the mythical happenings that bind you to this place by their sheer wild or gentle force. This is a place alive. So consumed might you be by th...

Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. Photo: Christopher Clarey   There are stories. And then there are “story-stories.” The twin reemergence of Roger Federer and Rafael “Rafa” Nadal this year has been one of those story-stories, full of wait-that’s-not-alls and tell-me-what-happened-nexts. Their return to form has been as emphatic as it was unexpected, a jolt of sun in a strange year. When the two faced off in the final of the Australian Open way back in January—which Federer won in a tense five sets (6–4, 3–6, 6–1, 3–6, 6–3)—there was the sense that the stars had simply happened to align one last fleeting time. Federer was ranked and seeded seventeenth at that time; Nadal hadn’t reached the semifinal of a major since 2014. The match was expected to be lightning caught in a bottle, something to be savored before reality set back in. But since then, Federer and Nadal have played three more times, including in two other finals. They even played on the same team—as doubles partners n...

Cristina Rivera Garza’s  The Iliac Crest  is one of the most fascinating novels I’ve read in years—utterly weird yet deeply resonant in its portrayal of gendered violence. On October 30th, Rivera Garza, Chavisa Woods , and I will meet to discuss the transgressive power of queer horror stories at the Mid-Manhattan Library at 42nd Street. In anticipation of that conversation, I spoke with Rivera Garza over email about the relationship between language and sanity, crossing both literal and literary borderlands, and transforming people of note—in this case, Mexican author  Amparo Dávila –into fictional characters. Samantha Hunt: In  The Iliac Crest  you create a new language, though in the book, the language seems to be less a creation, more an emergence. It appears the way a gathering of mushrooms might spring forth after rain. Central to this language is the word  glu .  I understand  glu  to have something to do with water and accord...