Excerpted from A Voyage Long and Strange

The Pilgrims didn’t think much of Cape Cod. “A hideous and desolate wilderness” William Bradford called it. “Full of wild beasts and wild men.” Rather than stay, a small party from the Mayflower sailed ahead, searching for a winter haven. In December 1620, they reached Plymouth, a place “fit for situation,” Bradford wrote. “At least it was the best they could find.”

On a New England road trip a few summers ago, I washed up in Plymouth, too. It could have been Dedham or Braintree or some other pit stop on the highway near Boston. But a Red Sox game pulsed on the radio, so I drove until it ended at the Plymouth exit. Stopping for beer at Myles Standish Liquor, I was directed to the William Bradford Motor Inn, the best I could find in peak tourist season.

Excerpted from Rex Ray: Art + Design

Back in 1997, I was in the Bay Area and on the town one night with my friend Liz, and she said, “Come on, Doug, we have to go to this art opening tonight.” I asked where, and Liz said, “In a hair salon up on Fillmore Street. Just come. It’ll be great.”

To be honest, I managed my expectations way downward for this one, and the hair salon opening was supposed to have been only one small event in the larger scheme of the night. When we arrived it was still just light out, and not many people had shown up yet. I just wanted to flee.

Excerpted from So You Want to Be President?

The Punditocracy. No, it’s not the latest cool-kid band out of Brooklyn; it’s the name for the collection of talking heads (again, not the band) that clutter our various media outlets. They frequently come in the form of newspaper or magazine opinion columnists (George Will, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Joe Klein) who spend their Sundays not in church, but sitting around a table with Tim Russert or George Stephanopoulos.

We also have the political “media personalities.” Media personalities tend to be hosts of their own often eponymous television shows. They and the pundits are close cousins, species with many similarities but several key differences — kind of like chimpanzees and orangutans, or Hanson and the Osmonds.

Excerpts from Q&As with Dorothy Parker, Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, Kurt Vonnegut, John Gardner, Elizabeth Bishop, Rebecca West, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Joan Didion — just a few of the magnificent interviews republished as The Paris Review Interviews Volume 1 and Volume 2

DOROTHY PARKER // 1956 (volume 1)

INTERVIEWER
And during this time you were writing poems?

PARKER
My verses. I cannot say poems. Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. My verses are no damn good. Let’s face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated — as anything once fashionable is dreadful now. I gave it up, knowing it wasn’t getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent gesture.

. . . 

SAUL BELLOW // 1966 (volume 1)

INTERVIEWER
You have on occasion divided recent American fiction into what you call the “cleans” and the “dirties.” The former, I gather, tend to be conservative and easily optimistic, the latter the eternal naysayers, rebels, iconoclasts. Do you feel this is still pretty much the picture of American fiction today?

Excerpted from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I am fond of my alphabet letters. At night, when it is a little too dark and the only sign of life is the small red spot in the center of the television screen, vowels and consonants dance for me to a Charles Trenet tune: “Dear Venice, sweet Venice, I’ll always remember you ...” Hand in hand, the letters cross the room, whirl around the bed, sweep past the window, wriggle across the wall, swoop to the door, and return to begin again.