Sue was not overly fond of bullfights. I believe they wearied and distressed her, although she did enjoy the music, the colors, and the pageantry. She went to bullfights with me in Spain—long ago, twenty-three years ago—when we were first together. 

The Paris Review Eagle, or “the bird” as it was referred to, was designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor, in the spring of 1952. The symbolism is not difficult: an American eagle is carrying a pen: the French association is denoted by the helmet the bird is wearing—actually a Phrygian hat originally given a slave on his freedom in ancient times and which subsequently became the liberty cap or bonnet rouge worn by the French Revolutionists of the 19th Century. 

His gentle, soft-spoken manner was reassuring. When I got my script back from him highlighted with yellow Post-it notes, I realized his keen perception hadn’t missed a thing. A fellow Texan, his masterful grasp and intimate knowledge of Texas slang helped reshape my wacky Texas characters into movie material.

It’s quite possible that the existence of these eight short stories, taken word for word from a collection of 148 diaries found in a dumpster in 2001, would come as a surprise to the diarist, Laura Francis.

In 1960 the French novelist, poet and encyclopedist Raymond Queneau, together with his friend Franqois Le Lionnais, a mathematical historian and chess expert, founded a research group, the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature.

When Tom Guinzburg became president of The Viking Press in 1961, its editors and other staff were, of course, people his father had hired. But Tom rapidly put his own personal stamp on Viking. No books were signed up that he didn’t personally approve, no advances against earnings offered that he didn’t authorize, no publicity plans and marketing arrangements plotted without his knowledge. And he made the often humdrum procedures quite dashing, being dashing himself.

In early spring of 1952, one William Styron, sallow, dark-haired, in his mid-twenties, bearing a scrawled note of introduction, turned up on the landing of the top-floor cold-water walk-up at 14 rue Perceval in Montparnasse that was to serve as the first home of a new and as yet unnamed literary review.

Jorge Luis Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical style. Argentine by birth and temperament, but nurtured on universal literature, Borges has no spiritual homeland. He creates, outside time and space, imaginary and symbolic worlds. 

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

He bustled into our office, short, stout, middle-aged, breathy—born May 8, 1895; we others were in our twenties—with popping reddish-brown eyes and fresh pink skin,