Skip to main content

Redux: Each Train Rips

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.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re traveling via plane, bus, and foot. Read on for Jan Morris’s Art of the Essay interview, Anuk Arudpragasam’s short story “So Many Different Worlds,” Sarah Green’s poem “Vortex, Amtrak,” W. S. Merwin’s essay “Flight Home,” and a portfolio of art by Paige Jiyoung Moon.

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

Interview
Jan Morris, The Art of the Essay No. 2
Issue no. 143 (Summer 1997)

I’m not the sort of writer who tries to tell other people what they are going to get out of the city. I don’t consider my books travel books. I don’t like travel books, as I said before. I don’t believe in them as a genre of literature. Every city I describe is really only a description of me looking at the city or responding to it.

ZION AND US (DETAIL), 2019, ACRYLIC ON PANEL, 11 X 14″.

Fiction
So Many Different Worlds
By Anuk Arudpragasam
Issue no. 237 (Summer 2021)

The bus was making its way in starts and stops, accelerating and braking as the driver tried, ruthlessly, to overtake on the crowded roads, and Ganesan was gazing out through the half-open window, at pedestrians waiting impatiently at traffic lights and bus stops, at passengers in other vehicles staring silently into their phones or out at the monotonous evening. The light hadn’t yet begun to fade but the day was coming to its end, the city’s commuters all lost in the long, mindless journey from place of work to place of sleep, their last remaining obligation to the outside world.

SUBWAY 2015, 2015, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 11 X 14″.

Poetry
Vortex, Amtrak
By Sarah Green
Issue no. 231 (Winter 2019)

Bright scab of track.
Bright stitch each train
rips out. In negative

degrees, metal cowers
as if a god had threatened
to curse it,

and did.

OAKHURST LODGE, 2018, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 12 X 16″.

Nonfiction
Flight Home
By W. S. Merwin
Issue no. 17 (Autumn-Winter 1957)

Part of the confusion, once the desire to go back got off the chart, arose from the suspicion that this was simply, at least in part, the first shock of maturity: a realization that home, where you grew up and belonged—belonged with and without your own volition—no longer exists. The desire to return to it, the moment you know it no longer exists.

LONELY PADDLE BOARDER, 2020, ACRYLIC ON PANEL, 18 X 24″.

Art
New and Recent Work
By Paige Jiyoung Moon, with an introduction by Charlotte Strick
Issue no. 236 (Spring 2021)

 

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives.


from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/31iUXE0
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Historical Future of Trans Literature

  Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us.  —Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi would not have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice-versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappa mundi were not intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import, rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Year in Reading: Daniel Torday

I’ve been on leave from teaching this year, so it’s been a uniquely good 12 months of reading for me, a year when I’ve read for only one reason: fun. Now when I say fun … I’m a book nerd. So I tend to take on “reading projects.” The first was to work toward becoming a Joseph Conrad completist. I’m almost there. I warmed up with critic Maya Jasanoff ’s The Dawn Watch: Conrad in a Global World , which granted me permission to remember the capacious scope of his perspective, his humanistic genius. His masterwork was hard work, but Nostromo belongs on the shelf of both the most important and most difficult of the 20th century. The Secret Agent blew the top of my head off—it’s funny and deeply relevant to our moment, about a terrorist bombing gone horribly wrong. Under Western Eyes is all I got left. 2018 isn’t over yet. But then much fun came in reading whatever, whenever. That started with a heavy dose of Denis Johnson . The new posthumous collection of his short stories, The Lar...
Post a Comment
Read more