Redux: Chance Progression

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.

Margaret Drabble photographed by Nancy Crampton.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about family bonds, in anticipation of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Read on for an Art of Fiction interview with Margaret Drabble, Tama Janowitz’s short story “American Dad,” Jeffrey Yang’s poem “Ancestors,” and a portfolio of photographs, “Iranian Family Portraits,” by Mohsen Rastani.

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

Interview
Margaret Drabble, The Art of Fiction No. 70
Issue no. 74 (Fall-Winter 1978)

My sister and I are very similar. She’s a novelist and our lives have been parallel in many ways. She has been an important part of my life. One’s relationship with one’s siblings and parents is something that you’re going to write about again and again, in different forms.

GYPSIES WITH THEIR PRIZE POSSESSIONS.

Fiction
American Dad
By Tama Jamowitz
Issue no. 80 (Summer 1981)

As we carried the bags of groceries in from the car the phone rang, my father called, telling me he was coming to Boston for a psychiatric convention. I picked up the phone and swung the receiver, with its extra long cord, over my shoulder, so that I could unload groceries while I talked. “Yes? Yes?” I said, “Saturday? Okay, sure. So how long is the psychiatric convention?”

“Just the weekend. It’s on treating mental illness with drugs.”

“Well, that sounds interesting,” I said. Actually, I didn’t see how it could be interesting for my father—he didn’t even believe in mental illness, let alone that it might be chemically based.

VILLAGERS FROM THE ELBURZ MOUNTAINS.

Poetry
Ancestors
By Jeffrey Yang
Issue no. 231 (Winter 2019)

Chance progression

Genomic drift

Split-apart generations
of the uprooted tree

abandoned the tablets for another ethos

Ancestors

never spoke of our ancestors

MRS. SEYHOON, GRANDMOTHER.

Art
Iranian Family Portraits
By Mohsen Rastani
Issue no. 186 (Fall 2008)

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives.