We Acquired a Toucan, Then We Had a Baby

Our Art of Fiction interview with Joy Williams.

The Paris Review Redux: free interviews, stories, poems, and art from the archives of The Paris Review. View this email in your browser Joy Williams. Photograph by Jonno Rattman. "I believed stories should have a purity and not be about what was going on," Joy Williams said to Paul Winner in her Art of Fiction interview, which appears in issue no. 209 of the Review. "And there was a lot going on, of course, in my life. My husband and I acquired a toucan, then we had a baby." This week, we're unlocking our Art of Fiction interview with Joy Williams, who also recently contributed the story "Concerning the Future of Souls" to our Spring issue. You can listen to Williams read the story in the latest episode of The Paris Review Podcast.  INTERVIEW The Art of Fiction No. 223 Joy Williams INTERVIEWER Can you define a story, if not its usefulness?   WILLIAMS What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes—which is Wallace Stevens, I think. As a form, the short story is hardly divine, though all excellent art has its mystery, its spiritual rhythm. I think one should be able to do a lot in less than twenty pages. I read a story recently about a woman who'd been on the lam and her husband dies and she ends up getting in her pickup and driving away at the end, and it was all about fracking, damage, dust to the communities, people selling out for fifty thousand dollars. It was so boring.   From issue no. 209 (Summer 2014) To read more from issue no. 209, including fiction by Rachel Cusk and Zadie Smith, why not subscribe? You'll receive four print issues a year plus unlimited digital access to our seventy-one-year archive. Copyright © 2024 The Paris Review. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: The Paris Review 544 West 27th Street 3rd Floor New York, New York 10001 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe, if you must.