TENNESSEE WILLIAMS FIRST VISITED New Orleans at the end of 1938, when he was twenty-seven years old. “Here surely is the place that I was made for if any place on this funny old world,” he wrote in his journal. After seven weeks of exploring the French Quarter and enjoying its Bohemian life, his restless spirit took hold and he headed west. Three years later, he returned to New Orleans, where—“writing a great deal and not badly I believe”—he produced a number of poems, two short stories, and several one-act plays.

SINCE THE CIVIL WAR, someone from pretty much every generation on the Sivits family tree has served in the military. When Daniel Sivits was a kid, his uncle, Carl Sivits, fought in the Korean War. Carl came back, but he could no longer handle life, and one night he ended it with a shotgun.

Fang Lin woke to the usual din: the bleat of a truck reversing; the steady, metallic tattoo of a jackhammer; the whining buzz of a steel saw; the driving in of nails; the slapping down of bricks; the irregular thumping—like sneakers in a dryer—of a cement mixer.

Up and down the coast, from Shenzhen to Fujian to Shanghai to Tianjin, this was what you heard. They were building—a skyscraper, a shopping mall, a factory, a new highway, an overpass, a subway, a train station—here, there, everywhere. 

Your nearsighted eyes cannot do the shooting. In response to the chinese government’s killing of pro-democracy protestors at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Liao Yiwu wrote several poems in which his anger at the state is matched by his own sense of frustration at being unable to fight back:

After a long walk and many stories of Moses, Moabites, Edomites, and Nabataeans, my guide, Ahmed Amrin, took me for coffee in a small park. Tall, thorny and mangled trees, called sidr in Arabic, shaded the garden. Mr. Amrin and the café’s owner, Bassam Abu Samhadana, both came from Kerak. In the center of Jordan, Kerak was known for a magnificent crusader fortress that the Muslims had conquered centuries ago. 

We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, “I love you.” But I didn’t know then how much. I had no idea … We lived in the dormitory of the fire station where he worked. I always knew what was happening—where he was, how he was.

Why, I wondered long ago, don’t the Iranians smile? Even before I first thought of visiting Iran, I remember seeing photographs of thousands of crying Iranians, men and women wearing black. In Iran, I read, laughing in a public place is considered coarse and improper.

A year and a few months after the end of the war and the German occupation, Paris was muted and looked bruised and forlorn. Everywhere I went, I sensed the tracks of the wolf that had tried to devour the city. But Paris proved as inedible as it had been since its tribal beginning on an island in the Seine, He de la Cite.

Sixteen years after the publication of this interview, what I remember of it—before rereading—is a veil of resentment that, perhaps unfairly, has lingered all this time. I was, it goes without saying, hugely pleased to have been invited to be the subject of a Paris Review interview; it was a distinction I valued. Yet what got stuck in my head afterward was the interviewer’s having hammered away at money.