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.
What were you up to in the seventies? Were you serving popcorn at Westland Twins cinema in LA, like Gary Indiana? Studying history at Dartmouth, like Annette Gordon-Reed? Hanging out at Club 57 on Saint Mark’s Place, like Scott Covert? Here at the Review, we’re looking back to the decade: a pivotal period for some of our recent contributors and the source of aesthetic inspiration for our redesign. To get into the mood, we’re unlocking a piece of experimental fiction by Pati Hill, Eudora Welty’s classic Art of Fiction interview, Paulé Bártón’s poem “The Sleep Bus,” and a series of drawings by the sculptor Claude Lalanne.
If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.
Interview
Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47
Issue no. 55 (Fall 1972)
Once you have heard certain expressions, sentences, you almost never forget them. It’s like sending a bucket down the well and it always comes up full. You don’t know you’ve remembered, but you have. And you listen for the right word, in the present, and you hear it. Once you’re into a story everything seems to apply—what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you’re writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story. I guess you’re tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized—if you can think of your ears as magnets.
Fiction
Dream Objects Moments
By Pati Hill
Issue no. 74 (Fall–Winter 1978)
I am a rocket.
As I shoot through the atmosphere I lose different parts of myself, most of them invisible to me though they can be seen by my passengers.
Poetry
The Sleep Bus
By Paulé Bártón
Issue no. 70 (Summer 1977)
No one on this bus
awake, no animals, no people.
Some damn racket bus!
To the back, shag goat sleeps.
To the front, the driver sleeps.
Art
Sculptures
By Claude Lalanne
Issue no. 49 (Fall 1970)
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