Skip to main content

Redux: In Honor of Jamaica Kincaid

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.

Cover art by Jonathan Borofsky.

In our Winter 1981 issue, The Paris Review published an early story by Jamaica Kincaid. Titled “What I Have Been Doing Lately,” it follows the narrator’s recursive, dreamlike journey in search of home. (You can listen to her reading it on the inaugural season of The Paris Review Podcast.) The story was included in Kincaid’s 1983 debut collection, At the Bottom of the River, which drew from her early life in Antigua and marked her as a singular voice in American letters. Kincaid has gone on to publish five novels and five books of nonfiction—she was a prolific New Yorker Talk of the Town columnist—as well as many other stories. In 2020, the Daily published two of her essays, “I See the World” and “Inside the American Snow Dome.”

It’s our pleasure to announce that on April 12, 2022, The Paris Review will present the Hadada, our annual lifetime achievement award, to Jamaica Kincaid at our Spring Revel.

To celebrate, we’re highlighting the work of previous Hadada winners in this week’s Redux. Read on for the Art of Fiction no. 223 with Joy Williams, Kincaid’s short story “What I Have Been Doing Lately,” N. Scott Momaday’s poem “Concession,” and a series of collages by John Ashbery.

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.

Eleven Collages by John Ashbery.

Interview
Joy Williams, The Art of Fiction No. 223
Issue no. 209 (Summer 2014)

The Keys were still kind of strange and unspoiled in the eighties. I went around the state and wrote things down, but nobody talked to me. Nobody! I’d limp into these bed-and-breakfasts and people would snarl at me and not want to talk. I mean, honestly, it was terrible and I had no idea what I was doing. And it wasn’t edited, nobody edited it.

Eleven Collages by John Ashbery.

Fiction
What I Have Been Doing Lately
By Jamaica Kincaid
Issue no. 82 (Winter 1981)

What I have been doing lately: I was lying in bed and the doorbell rang. I ran downstairs. Quick. I opened the door. There was no one there. I stepped outside. Either it was drizzling or there was a lot of dust in the air and the dust was damp. I stuck out my tongue and the drizzle or the damp dust tasted like government school ink. I looked north. I looked south. I decided to start walking north. While walking north I decided that I didn’t have any shoes on my feet and that is why I was walking so fast.

Eleven Collages by John Ashbery.

Poetry
Concession
By N. Scott Momaday
Issue no. 99 (Spring 1986)

Believe the sullen sense that sickness made,
And broke you in its hands.

Believe that death inhabits the mere shade
Intimacy demands.

I drink, my love, to your profound disease;
Its was the better suit.

I could not have provided you this ease,
Nor this peace, absolute.

Eleven Collages by John Ashbery.

Art
Eleven Collages
By John Ashbery
Issue no. 188 (Spring 2009

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/3lFuAPY

Labels

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

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more