Redux: Literary Gossip

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.

In honor of the longtime friendship between BOMB and the Review, we’re offering a bundled subscription to both magazines until the end of February. Save 20% on a year of the best in art and literature—and for your weekly archive reading, a selection of authors that the two of us have each published over the years.

Interview
Gary Indiana, The Art of Fiction No. 250
Issue no. 238 (Winter 2021)

I was desperate to write a novel, but I didn’t have a story. Whenever I tried to write fiction it was all about my own inner bullshit. Writing about films and architecture and books was never the end point of what I wanted to do, but it forced me to get outside my own head, to describe physical objects and action. And then somebody handed me a story.

Fiction
Second Dog
By Kate Zambreno
Issue no. 228 (Spring 2019)

When I think about getting a second dog, I think about what we might name the dog. It’s exciting that we won’t have to disguise naming the dog after a writer or artist. Our dog is named Genet, and I fantasize about a little terrier named Violette Leduc, so if our Genet ignores her or humps her, I can pretend I’m enacting some literary gossip, as Violette Leduc always abjected herself to Genet in her desire for his friendship. With babies, there is more pressure to at least disguise one’s pretensions.

Poetry
Learning Persian
By Solmaz Sharif
Issue no. 230 (Fall 2019)

deek-teh
deek-tah-tor
behn-zeen
dee-seh-pleen
eh-pe-deh-mi
fahn-te-zi
mu-zik
bahnk
mah-de-mah-zel
sees-tem
vah-nil
vee-la
vee-roos
ahm-pee-ree-ah-lizm
doh-see-eh
oh-toh-ree-te

Art
Walton Ford and Ryan McGinley
By Waris Ahluwalia
Issue no. 201 (Summer 2012)

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.

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Philistines

Welcome to Disney World! Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 1. Once I had to go to Disney World with my small children. On the way to the airport our taxi driver exhibited signs of Obsessive Disney Disorder—when he found out where we were going he started obsessively describing and listing and explaining everything that had to do with Disney World, even though he was a grown man. We stayed at the Portofino Bay Hotel, a Disney-owned property that is a replica of the storied village on the Italian Riviera. There were imitation Renaissance churches and Mediterranean piazzas clustered around a fake harbor with old Fiats parked on the cobblestones and fishing boats moored in the fake bay. Outside cafés ranged on the harbor, serving espresso under green-and-white striped awnings. Italian cypresses were planted along the pools. If you didn’t know it was a Disney replica of a real place, it would have to be characterized as being extremely tasteful and lovely. So you did tend to ge...

Dressing for Others: Lawrence of Arabia’s Sartorial Statements

Left: T. E. Lawrence; Right: Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) In the southwest Jordanian desert, among the sandstone mountains of Wadi Rum, there is a face carved into a rock. The broad cheeks and wide chin are framed by a Bedouin kuffiyeh headdress and ‘iqal, and beneath the carving, in Arabic, are the words: “Lawrence The Arab 1917.” If you are visiting Wadi Rum with a tour guide, you can expect to be brought to this carving. You may also be shown a spring where Lawrence allegedly bathed, as well as a mountain named after his autobiography, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, whose rock face has been weathered into a shape that does, from some angles, look a little like a series of pillars. I am familiar with the legend of T.E. Lawrence—fluent Arabist, British hero of the Arab Revolt of 1916, troubled lover of the Arab peoples—as well as with the ways the Jordanian tourism industry has capitalized on this legend. Nevertheless, I am still surprised when I hear someone mentio...

The Beautiful Faraway: Why I’m Grateful for My Soviet Childhood

At 10 I wanted to be an artist, practiced a hysterical form of Christianity, talked to trees, and turned a sunset at a local park into a visionary experience. My great-aunt lured me to Evangelical Christianity with the strangeness of Gospel stories where Jesus always ended up angry at his disciples’ failure to understand. I sympathized with being misunderstood, and latched on. Besides, Christianity was a forbidden fruit in Soviet Russia so I had to worship in secret. This was unnerving but also alluring. I was a breathless romantic who wanted to be surprised by a knight on a white horse. From the early ‘80s to the early ‘90s, my childhood was formed by the images, atmosphere, and allusiveness of Soviet songs. I grew up in an artistic family where emotions flew high. I was the kind of imaginative child who could spin an entire tale from an oblong stain on the kitchen table. But there’s more to it than that. My family was not always idealistic or romantic, especially not in New York in...

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