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A Field Guide to Ukrainian Sex
A Field Guide to Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko is a book that absolutely deserves to be translated into English, and pronto. Ostensibly the tale of a disastrous love… More
Watching As the World Vanishes
It was shameful, everyone agreed afterward, that no one did anything at the time. Because people knew it was happening. There were reports, early on. People saw things, near… More
Patriot Act reauthorization blocked
Writers, booksellers, librarians, and other defenders of reader privacy last night won the biggest battle yet in their four-year fight to restore the protections for the privacy of bookstore… More
Poet’s Choice
I attended an event last month in New York City sponsored by the PEN American Center and entitled "State of Emergency: Unconventional Readings." PEN believes that it is urgently… More
PEN denounces postponement in Orhan Pamuk trial
PEN, the world association of writers, decried the suspension of trial proceedings against Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, insisting the charges against him should have been dismissed outright and calling… More
Aerial Maneuvers
Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, the book of his I love most, has accompanied me through life as a sort of moral and political manifesto. It may seem… More
Mary Gordon: Bodies of Knowledge
The Waves is Virginia Woolf's most difficult book. It is a difficult book by any standards, and its difficulty and its greatness are intertwined. Part of the difficulty is… More
1,001 Laughs
Back in the thirties, Borges worked for an Argentinean women's magazine called El Hogar--a magazine of middle-class attitudes and presumptions, roughly similar to Redbook in America today. More
A Place in the Procession
Long long ago I dreamed this: an old soul, mud-colored, thin, ropy-haired, hunkers at a campfire. A line of naked youth has formed on the lip of a cliff.… More
Salman Rushdie: The Imaginary Real
In 1981, Italo Calvino's book If on a Winter's Night a Traveler was published in England to what I remember as a more or less resounding silence. Very few… More
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