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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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...

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...

The Rejection Plot

Print from Trouble , by Bruce Charlesworth, a portfolio which appeared in The Paris Review in the magazine’s Fall 1985 issue. Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question—Will they or won’t they? — the rejection plot spoils everything upfront:...

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