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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 y

In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photo: Lucy Scholes. In the final months of 1922, people all across the United Kingdom were gripped by a cause célèbre. In the early hours of October 4, Percy Thompson, a shipping clerk, and his wife, Edith, a twenty-eight-year-old bookkeeper and buyer for a millinery business, were making their way home after a trip to the theater in the West End. About a hundred yards from their house in Ilford, a lower-middle-class suburb in North-East London, a man suddenly appeared, stabbed Percy multiple times in the face, neck, and body, and then raced off into the night. Percy died almost instantly. Reporting on the event the following day, the Times declared that the details were still “a mystery,” and that the police were waiting for Edith to recover enough to be able to “give a coherent account of the incidents preceding her husband’s death.” Then, only twenty-four hours later, the case took an u

Livingston, Neem Tree Crow , 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. At first it was the underwear. I wanted to become a tree because trees did not wear bras. Then it had to do with the specter of violence. I loved the way in which trees coped with dark and lonely places while sunlessness decided curfew hours for me. I liked, too, how trees thrived on things that were still freely available—water, air, and sunlight; and no mortgage in spite of their lifelong occupation of land. My amorphous fancies about trees began to coalesce when I entered middle age and began to weigh the benefits of a freelancer’s life against that of a salaried professional. An epiphany wrapped me like a tendril—were trees freelancers or salaried employees? A tree was a daily wage laborer, its life of work bound to the cycle of sunlight. Holidays, vacations, weekends, the salaried life, pension, loans—all of these were recent inventions, nothing more than consolations offered to employees like myself. So

A page from Henri Cole’s 1995-96 notebook In 1995, the poet Henri Cole traveled to Italy as the recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature. While there, he spent time with the American painter and photographer Chuck Close, who died last week, aged eighty-one. Recently, Cole came across a notebook in which he had recorded his impressions. I’ve just come from a little opening up on the fourth floor, and while the pastel landscapes were fine to look at, most remarkable was a brief conversation I had with the painter Chuck Close, who suddenly began speaking quite openly about his ailment or condition, the result, I believe, of a blood clot in his spine. He said he’s been in his present state for seven years, and that he only feels heat from his shoulders up. Pointing to his scalp, he said the only place he can perspire is through a small patch of skin on the left side of his head. When he is touched anywhere below his shoulders, what he feels is an icy cold. He is happiest in the sun in

Louise Bourgeois, The Destruction of the Father , 1974, latex, plaster, wood, fabric, and red light. Collection Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz. The exhibition rooms on the second floor of the Jewish Museum are densely shadowed and cavernous, the scant light artificial and angular. In one, the mouth of a veined brown marble fireplace hangs open, eating air. It’s an apt setting for the exhibition “ Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter ,” which traces the artist’s fraught relationship to psychoanalysis, including her reactions to her own thirty-three years of treatment. Journal entries, dream fragments recorded on scraps of paper, fabric works, the iconic Passage Dangereux (1997), Destruction of the Father (1974), and Ventouse (Cupping Jar) (1990) constitute only a portion of the show. A cluster of Bourgeois’s writings speak to her relationship to sadism, fear, self-destructio

Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones during a concert at the Royal Lawn Tennis Stadium in Stockholm, 1965. Photo: Owe Wallin. © Tobias Rostlund / Alamy Stock Photo. The drummer Charlie Watts died on Tuesday, aged eighty. Watts took up the drums as a child after cutting the neck off his banjo and converting it to a snare. Born in London during World War II, the son of a truck driver and a homemaker, he was a jazz aficionado from the age of twelve, and went to art school in his teens. In 1963, the Rolling Stones hired him away from Alex Korner’s Blues Incorporated, and Watts—cultivating a stoic demeanor and known for his refined fashion sense—remained a member of the band until his death. Mike Edison’s 2019 biography Sympathy for the Drummer is a work of music criticism in the spirit of Lester Bangs. Watts did not speak to Edison for the book, but after its initial publication he called the author and left him a message: “Hi, you don’t know me, my name is Charlie Watts, I want to tha

Photo: Sushant Sehgal. I met Vinod Busjeet a few summers ago in Denver, where several of us writers of Indian origin found ourselves together in a workshop at the Lighthouse Lit Fest. I remember thinking his elegance and erudition were impressive. But what lingered in my mind was a detail from the work he had submitted to the class, the closing chapter of a bildungsroman, now published as Silent Winds, Dry Seas . The protagonist, Vishnu Bhushan, takes enormous pride in his delicate hands. A scholarship student from the island of Mauritius, off the coast of East Africa, he refuses a work-study job washing dishes in a Yale dining hall. Manual labor is abhorrent to him. At first, I found his fastidiousness comical. Then I realized that Vishnu dreads working with his hands because he fears it will bind him metaphorically to the servitude of his Indian ancestors on Mauritian sugar estates. “Sugarcane hell” is how one of Vishnu’s cousins, still tied to the land, describes the backbreakin

Geburtstags-Stilleben, Series 296 , 1910, Oilette postcard depicting a birthday cake, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I was very blue for the weeks running up to my sixtieth. I suppose I was triste. I couldn’t explain to myself why I was so low. When I wasn’t researching and writing or sorting out my daughter’s university accommodation, I trawled the flea markets and vintage shops collecting stuff for my unreal estate in the Mediterranean. So far, I had found a pair of wooden slatted blinds, two linen tablecloths, a copper frying pan, six small coffee cups, and a watering can made from tin with a long spout. I was collecting things for a parallel life, or a life not yet lived, a life that was waiting to be made. In a way, these objects resembled the early drafts of a novel. * I was thinking about existence. And what it added up to. Had I done okay? Who was doing the judging? Had there been enough happy years, had there been enough love and loving? Were my own books, the ones

Sigrid Nunez. Photo: © Marion Ettlinger. Certain books—the best ones—feel ordained, their creation inevitable, their nonexistence unimaginable. If the path to that existence was imperiled, the inevitable quality is only enhanced: the indispensable book exists not despite but because of those obstacles. Sigrid Nunez’s 1995 debut, A Feather on the Breath of God , suggests, with its title, haphazard travel, and in fact the book did follow a halting and elliptical path to existence. But the book is no feather. It sails to its mark like an arrow, laying bare an untold past at the same time as it lays out a suddenly imaginable future. The book is both arrival and departure, for both author and readers. Sigrid Nunez is the sort of writer who is always going to say it better than the rest of us; better than me, at least. Already I find that, at the end of many months’ rumination and many hours’ active struggle I have, with my very first complete paragraph above on the subject of Sigrid Nun