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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
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
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
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
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
Different Hughes
Langston Hughes was a performer, and he made being Langston Hughes look triumphantly easy. 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