The following letter of Dylan Thomas is addressed to Marguerite Caetani, the editor of the legendary magazine Botteghe Oscure. Dylan Thomas needs no introduction, but a brief description of his remarkable patroness seems in order.

Sometime after midnight on Wednesday I was standing in Grant Park about ten feet in front of the National Guard’s bayonet picket fence and talking to some Digger-types from Berkeley. There were three of them, wearing those Milwaukee truck-driver hats with mustaches instead of beards, and their demeanor—their vibes, as it were—made it clear that I was talking to some veteran counter-punchers. They were smelling around for a fight, but they weren’t about to start one; they had a whole park to kill time in, but for their own reasons they’d chosen to stand on the front line of the Mob, facing the Guardsman across ten feet of empty sidewalk. 

In what follows, Thomson talks about his relationships with people he knew in Paris. It is a monologue constructed from conversations recorded in February 1981 in Windsor, Ontario.

The work of the Office of Nomenclature Stabilization can be said to have started in the period 1949-1951, although its full organization in its present form—the voluminous files, the worldwide network of correspondents—only came later.

In one of those years John Train, then studying for a Master’s degree at Harvard in Comparative Literature, noticed in Collier’s magazine a Mr. Katz Meow, of Hoquiam, Washington.

The golden age of the expatriate literary life is already well past, there seems no getting around it, although like most golden ages it may never have existed and be simply a useful myth, a theme of conversation and art. Certainly the sympathetic enthusiasts of Mürger and du Marnier, and even of Imagism and Dada, seem as distant now as the shepherd-folk of the pastoral convention.

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. 

Thoughts on American Economy. I wash my own shirts and rub and rub, leaning over the wash-stand or the bathtub and dirt wont come off—an off-white, off-blue, off-tan line remains along the collar and the cuffs, and my back hurts and my shoulder blades hurt, and my time passes without writing or reading. 

In 1952 a rich and lively magazine given to moral teachings and the wonders of science published a “factual study" of the hangover, sub-titling it in block letters A SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS, and sub-sub-titling it (for the immediate relief of drunks and advertisers): “The damage is not real; headache may be due to liver and shakes to remorse; a cure would be worth a fortune.”

The interest in the feature entitled “China: Literary Happenings,” which appeared in the last issue of The Paris Review, has been such that the magazine has asked Timothy Tung, who collected the material, to put additional questions to Dong Leshan whose short story, "The Topsy-Turvy World of Professor Fu,” was featured. Dong, who is a visiting scholar at Cornell University, had been asked a number of questions about his story and the current state of writing and publishing in today’s China. What follows is an extension to those remarks.

Manuel Rodriguez ‘Manolete’ had entered his thirty-first year on July 4th, 1947. His birthplace was Cordoba, a hundred and twenty kilometres down the Guadalquivir from Linares. Since 1939 he had been at the height of his profession; lean, hawk-nosed, and saturnine, he was