Redux: Volume and Color

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.

William Styron.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the release of our latest issue with selections from Fall 2019 contributors who have previously appeared in the magazine. Read on for William Styron’s 1999 Art of Fiction interview, Diane Williams’s short story “O Fortuna, Velut Luna,” and Kevin Prufer’s poem “The Adulterer.”

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

William Styron, The Art of Fiction No. 156
Issue no. 150 (Spring 1999)

There have been certain scenes in all my works that came to me with such mysterious ease—with the sense of being preordained—that I can only attribute them to the same powerful subconscious process.

O Fortuna, Velut Luna
By Diane Williams
Issue no. 226 (Fall 2018)

What is Miss Treece’s trouble, according to a popular notion?

The man A has failed to show up.

Arousing herself at the restaurant, she fixes her lipstick when her solo supper concludes and takes herself down the stairs situated behind the bar.

There, at her business in the restroom, the foamy hand soap is suggestive of fun, but there’s the wringing of her hands and the twitching of her fingers while she washes.

“I never heard. I don’t know … ” Another woman was speaking into her phone before clicking it off. And these two women might have briefly inspired one another had they smiled, because they were both disillusioned.

But they might still build temples to themselves of volume and color, as a poet once said.

The Adulterer
By Kevin Prufer
Issue no. 214 (Fall 2015)

Thinking to have their fun, those boys
set a match to the kerosene-soaked
rabbit
………..then watched it blaze across the lawn
and into the garage
……………………..where it thumped
and smoldered behind the wheelbarrow—

*

and so it also entered the memory
of the girl who watched
from her bedroom window

but never spoke of it to anyone—

*

and, They were going to skin it and eat it, anyway,
I told myself, having stopped at my desk
to think about the scene
I’d just invented.

Don’t mind me, said the little voice
at the back of the garage.

Then, silence. Tools and a ladder.

I’ve done terrible things,
I said into the black garage.

If you like what you read, get a year of The Paris Review—four new issues, plus instant access to everything we’ve ever published.

from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/2Q1kLyN

Comments

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog