Redux: Like No One Else

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.

Detail from Ghost. All drawings by Ed Ruscha.

“I styled myself to look like no one else,” Jamaica Kincaid tells Darryl Pinckney in an Art of Fiction interview that appears in our new issue. “And I also knew I didn’t want to write like anyone else.” Tonight, at our first Spring Revel since 2019, we will present Kincaid with our lifetime achievement award, the Hadada, while Chetna Maroo will accept the Plimpton Prize for Fiction. To celebrate, we’re revisiting work by some of the recent prizewinners we were unable to honor in person: Jonathan Escoffery, who was awarded the Plimpton in 2020; Leigh Newman, recipient of that year’s Terry Southern Prize for “humor, wit, and sprezzatura”; and N. Scott Momaday, who accepted the Hadada last year. (And if you missed the story we unlocked last month by Eloghosa Osunde, winner of the 2021 Plimpton Prize, you can always make it right by subscribing.) We’re also including a 1987 portfolio of drawings by the chair of this year’s Revel, Ed Ruscha.

If you enjoy these free short stories and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

POETRY
Concession
N. Scott Momaday

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

Believe that death inhabits the mere shade
Intimacy demands.

From issue no. 99 (Spring 1986)

Detail from Red Hostess.

PROSE
Under the Ackee Tree
Jonathan Escoffery

If you’re a man who utterly failed his child, you can either lie down to join him in death, or you can do more for those remaining. If the latter you choose, the first thing you can do is call your wife and beg she to take you back. You can leave message on she answering machine and explain there’s no more reason you must be apart, and if it embarrass she feel, no one up a stateside has to know. At least, no one has to talk about it.

But if you do this, man will show up at your door early one morning, and when you answer him, Yes, I’m Topper, him will smile and hand you a manila envelope and say, You’ve been served.

From issue no. 229 (Summer 2019)

Detail from Woman from History.

PROSE
Howl Palace
Leigh Newman

To the families on the lake, my home is a bit of an institution. And not just for the wolf room, which my agent suggested we leave off the list of amenities, as most people wouldn’t understand what we meant. About the snow-machine shed and clamshell grotto, I was less flexible. Nobody likes a yard strewn with snow machines and three-wheelers, one or two of which will always be busted and covered in blue tarp. Ours is just not that kind of neighborhood.

From issue no. 230 (Fall 2019)

Detail from Diminished Respect.

ART
Drawings
Edward Ruscha

From issue no. 103 (Summer 1987)

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