The Paris Review Interviews Now Online

The Paris Review, the great lit­er­ary jour­nal co-found­ed by George Plimp­ton, unveiled last week a new web site and a big archive of inter­views with famous lit­er­ary fig­ures. Span­ning five decades, the inter­views often talk about the “how” of lit­er­a­ture (to bor­row a phrase from Salman Rushdie) – that is, how writ­ers go about writ­ing. Rum­mag­ing through the archive, you will encounter con­ver­sa­tions with TS Eliot, William Faulkn­er, Ralph Elli­son, Ernest Hem­ing­way, Simone de Beau­voir, Saul Bel­low, Jorge Luis Borges, Nor­man Mail­er, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, John Stein­beck, Joan Did­ion, Kurt Von­negut, Eudo­ra Wel­ty, Ray­mond Carv­er, Rus­sell Banks, Don DeLil­lo, Toni Mor­ri­son, Paul Auster, etc. And, amaz­ing­ly, this list only scratch­es the sur­face of what’s avail­able.

Note: These inter­views are sep­a­rate­ly avail­able in book for­mat: The Paris Review Inter­views, Vol­umes 1–4.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!