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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
Michael Cunningham: First Love
"First Love," by Michael Cunningham, appears in PEN America 1: Classics. This talk was originally presented at a tribute to Virginia Woolf, sponsored by the PEN Forums Committee, at Town… More
Thrown Voices: Richard Howard & Susan Sontag
SUSAN SONTAG: I think of Richard Howard as a very central figure in our culture, maintaining and giving eloquent voice and illustration to standards that are in peril today.… More
The Prison
The prisoner took a step—then another—and broke into a run. He hit the fence six feet above ground and scrambled to the top. Grabbing barbed wire, he ignored the… More
Albert Mobilio and Geoffrey O’Brien
Albert Mobilio: In a very clever book called Home Rules that was published a few years ago, the authors look at the rules that govern a house. They're very… More
Confessions of a Silent Genre
The reader’s report is the most silent of literary genres, its existence publicly acknowledged only in attacks or parodies. In Umberto Eco’s Misreadings, spectacularly obtuse flunkies advise publishers to… More
Uneasy Peace
Many years ago, during what would have been my senior year in college if I hadn't left college and moved to New York, I got to attend a writers'… More
Lifetimes Out of Moments
A small boat crowded to the gunnels with journalists met the docking of Gertrude Stein’s steamship in New York. Her name ran like an illuminated rabbit around Times Square.… More
Laughter in the Dark
We went on to talk about other things, and then, out of the blue, ten or fifteen minutes later, apropos of nothing, he leaned forward across the table and… More
Different Hughes
Langston Hughes was a performer, and he made being Langston Hughes look triumphantly easy. More
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