Redux: Her Ticking Wrist

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.

Kazuo Ishiguro. Photo: Frankie Fouganthin. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

This week at The Paris Review, the clock is ticking. Read on for Kazuo Ishiguro’s Art of Fiction interview, Tess Gallagher’s short story “The Leper,” and Mary Jo Bang’s poem “Mystery at Manor Close.”

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Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No. 196
Issue no. 184 (Spring 2008)

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a writing routine?

ISHIGURO

I usually write from ten o’clock in the morning until about six o’clock. I try not to attend to emails or telephone calls until about four o’clock.

Photo: CGP Grey. via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

The Leper
By Tess Gallagher
Issue no. 96 (Summer 1985)

But today, just as we began to settle into the relative comfort of this routine, the phone rang. It was my friend Jerome, a sculptor. He is a man who treads an uneasy path between fear and despair, and someone who could ill afford to be calling me at two o’clock in the afternoon on a weekday when telephone rates are at their peak.

Photo: Illymarry. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Mystery at Manor Close
By Mary Jo Bang
Issue no. 186 (Fall 2008)

—Quickly Brenda stepped aside and tripped up the Biology Mistress.

She puts her ticking wrist to her ear and hears a house
Full of Tock from the clock that is lacking a stem.
On the face it says Mickey and Mouse.
(All of which comes from within.)

She makes a wish: that the Heather who left her
In stormy weather will find herself
In the mire of desires that cannot be easily realized.
To your health, she says, and sticks out her foot

To feel the fire in its place …

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