The Paris Review

“You want a poem to register in every mind the way it did in yours. Then you discover this never happens. Still, it is what you strive for. You try to make a version of it as incapable of being mutilated as possible.” —Louise Glück buff.ly/a90PjB1

“I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.”

This week, we’ve unlocked our Art of Fiction interview with Mario Vargas Llosa from the archive. buff.ly/Cgd7Fx0

“Poems are things. I like when they’re jagged—long lines and short lines next to each other … “If I had to choose between a poem being therapeutic and it being a better poem, I’d want it to be a better poem.” —Sharon Olds buff.ly/lhpyOlp

“I’ve never had that feeling of block, maybe because I spend so much time dreaming things up before I sit down to write. Only when the characters are refined enough in my mind can I put them into words.” —Marie NDiaye buff.ly/jrUzwT0

“The definition of the novel tends to be more elastic in Italy, and autofiction isn’t some trendy thing but recognized as a loose tradition.” —Jhumpa Lahiri

Subscribe to our summer deal: through Labor Day, get both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for a combined price of $119. That’s $70 off the regular price.

“If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down.” —Fanny Howe in our new Summer issue.
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“Reading has always been one of the great pleasures of life, but it’s also a form of work.” —Marie NDiaye
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“I started gardening when my children were young—I taught them to make martinis so they could bring them to me in the garden.” —Jamaica Kincaid buff.ly/xeQFb2E

View Auras by Anne Collier in our Summer issue.
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“I took the copies to the offices of Minuit, Gallimard, and Éditions du Seuil. I didn’t think too much about it when I submitted it, and it didn’t seem like a miracle to me that it was acquired, although it was tremendous luck.” —Marie NDiaye
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“Humor doesn’t cut it, or romance, or lyricism—no, no, no. Only terror works.” —Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Fanny Howe, The Art of Poetry No. 118 “If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down.”

“The writing just kept coming to me. It was almost no effort at all. I would just not get up out of bed and write, write, write, write, write.” —Fanny Howe
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“I tend to prefer books in which the bow isn’t perfectly tied but slightly undone. After all, our lives are full of secrets that will never be revealed, enigmas that will never be resolved.” —Marie NDiaye
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“Anytime I’m not actively composing a little bit every day, I’m afraid that I will stop writing, and I don’t feel good if I don’t write.” —Alice Notley

Catching up with Geoff Dyer by Sophie Haigney June 17, 2025 – “What makes things interesting to the reader? It depends on the quality of writing and perception—which, I suppose, is what people say when they’re banging on about Proust!”

Geoff Dyer in a recent interview in @parisreview.bsky.social: “The humor in my later books is sometimes very adolescent, which strikes me as a good sign—immaturing with age.”
www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/06...

“The best novels are produced when authors creatively disrupt the form of the novel ... The contemporary world is so complex and protean that it is no longer possible to describe it with linear prose and squeeze it into a traditional novel’s structure.”

Copies of The Paris Review and Vengeance is Mine on the front counter at Island Books.

Marie NDiaye crowd check out the latest @parisreview.bsky.social for an excellent interview with NDiaye! She revises very little and she doesn't write drafts. Also NDiaye shares her favorite books.

Modernist Blondes by Marlowe Granados July 24, 2025 – On Anita Loos’s Great American Novel.

My introduction to the re-issue of GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES no up on @parisreview.bsky.social www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/07...

“I don’t know any rich people, or twins, for that matter.”

Love to read but hate to choose? Through Labor Day, you really can have it all when you subscribe to both The Paris Review ( @parisreview.bsky.social) and The New York Review of Books for a combined price of $119. subscribe.nybooks.com/ecom/nyb/app...

Announcing our summer subscription deal: through Labor Day, subscribe to both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for a combined price of $119. That’s $70 off the regular price! buff.ly/BOiKss7

“When you ask me to talk about my true memories, they’re covered over by the fictional versions of them that have been in my mind since the day I wrote the books. This makes it hard to distinguish.” —Gerald Murnane

“If having her in the apartment was causing so much trouble, she said, her voice carefully controlled, then maybe Navini had made a mistake inviting her to stay so long.”

From “The Visit” by Anuk Arudpragasam in our Summer issue. buff.ly/Lvs0Joy

Ten Questions for Joy Williams by The Paris Review July 28, 2025 – “The thought of two upper-class ladies attacking a slaughterhouse enchanted me.”

“I don’t know any rich people, or twins, for that matter.”

Joy Williams answers ten of our questions.

“It was actually a vision of the leeches on a lakeshore—a sizzling chili red and long as baguettes.”

Joy Williams answers ten of our questions. buff.ly/eJEFmbU

“What I loved in Frank’s poem aside from the glitter of the style of it was this broken rhythm. It was almost like listening to jazz, or the kind of jazz that someone like Prokofiev might write.” —James Schuyler

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Ten Questions for Joy Williams by The Paris Review July 28, 2025 – “The thought of two upper-class ladies attacking a slaughterhouse enchanted me.”

“I really want to thank the fact-checkers at The Paris Review—I misstated a conversation between Ratty and Mole in The Wind in the Willows and they caught it big-time.”

Joy Williams answers ten of our questions.

“The thought of two upper-class ladies attacking a slaughterhouse enchanted me.”

Joy Williams answers ten of our questions. buff.ly/eJEFmbU