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Ray Bradbury, 1920–2012
“I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t...
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Fact-checking Ray Bradbury
We’re out this week, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2012 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year! I didn’t grow up reading The Paris Review. My earliest...
View ArticleSingular, Difficult, Shadowed, Brilliant
The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is...
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Louise Erdrich Wins NBA for Fiction
We’d like to congratulate Louise Erdrich on her National Book Award for The Round House. The following quote, from her Art of Fiction interview, explores the author’s approach to writing: I take great...
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Chinua Achebe, 1930–2013
“We live in a society that is in transition from oral to written. There are oral stories that are still there, not exactly in their full magnificence, but still strong in their differentness from...
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Tricks of the Trade
“Generally one would like to avoid tricking oneself.” —Ian McEwan, the Art of Fiction No. 173
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Life Sentence
INTERVIEWER You’ve said you can’t bear to have a bad sentence in front of you. HEMPEL Yes. I still can’t. Makes me ill. —Amy Hempel, the Art of Fiction No. 176
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Realer Than Real
Charles Dickens was born today in 1812. FOOTE The most illuminating thing that ever happened to me in those early days was winning as a Sunday-school prize a copy of David Copperfield. Now, I’d read...
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Noodles and Mush
A valiant mascot shovels snow outside the Nissin Cup Noodles Museum in Yokohama. All my life I ate noodles. Because my mother used to repair old lacework. And one thing about old lace is that odors...
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Paperback Writer
Happy fiftieth birthday, Jonathan Lethem! Photo: Fred Benenson INTERVIEWER You don’t seem to have bothered to rebel against your parents’ milieu—their bohemianism, their leftism. LETHEM I tried. It’s...
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A Curmudgeonly Pain in the Ass
Michel Houellebecq is fifty-eight today. INTERVIEWER You’ve said that you are “an old Calvinist pain-in-the-ass.” What do you mean? HOUELLEBECQ I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the...
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A Philip Roth Bonanza
The birthday boy, looking decidedly more bored than he’d be if he were reading our back issues. Philip Roth turns eighty-one today. You must be wondering: How can you, little old you, partake of such...
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Dude Looks Like a Lady
Flannery O’Connor was born today in 1925. O’Connor, right, with Robie Macauley and Arthur Koestler in Iowa, 1947. Photo: C. Macauley, via Wikimedia Commons BARRY HANNAH Flannery O’Connor was probably...
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Give a Warm Welcome to Our Newest Issue
At last! Spring is here, Easter is coming, and, as you can see, the latest issue of The Paris Review has already taken its pastels out of the closet—it’s ready to sally forth into the cherry blossoms....
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Realism for Everyone
Donald Barthelme would’ve been, and should be, eighty-three today. It would be an exaggeration to say that I feel the absence of someone I never met—someone who died when I was three—but I do wonder,...
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Kingsley Amis’s James Bond Novel
Happy birthday to Kingsley Amis, who would be ninety-two today. In his 1975 Art of Fiction interview, Amis says, I think it’s very important to read widely and in a wide spectrum of merit and ambition...
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Gabriel García Márquez, 1927-2014
García Márquez in high school, as seen in our Summer 2003 issue We’re saddened to report that Gabriel García Márquez has died at eighty-seven. The Paris Review interviewed him in 1981: INTERVIEWER Why...
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Party Like Bilbo
Alan Hollinghurst is sixty today. Photo: Larry D. Moore HOLLINGHURST I was rather a goody-goody as a child. I hated the idea of being in the wrong and dreaded being punished. Everyone at my prep school...
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“The Swimmer” and The Swimmer
It’s John Cheever’s birthday, and courtesy of 92Y, you can listen to a recording of the author reading his most famous story, “The Swimmer,” in December 1977. It’s easy to shrug off such a canonical...
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Maya Angelou, 1928–2014
Angelou in 2013. Photo: York College of Pennsylvania There is, I hope, a thesis in my work: we may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. That sounds goody-two-shoes, I know, but I...
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