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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
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
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
Open Destiny of Life
Let me put it this way: I went to school to poetry—that was where I learned how to write. People learn to write by doing various things. I suppose… More
Real People: Dorothy Allison on Steinbeck
You write like a man, I was told. No, I write like a dyke. Except—except sometimes I try to write like John Steinbeck. I try to go from everyday… More
Paul Auster on Samuel Beckett: 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
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
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