The Terror of the Words
I believe in serendipity and geography, and both factors played a part in bringing Beckett into my life. In the early 1950s, I was living in Paris, ostensibly at… More
Bad Behavior
Prose fiction was born Protestant. It is a child of the Enlightenment, and though it has some exotic forebears—romance most nearly, drama and poetry further back—it could only have… More
Peter Matthiessen: Story Lines
John Steinbeck’s admirable early work was an important part of my own formative reading: the grit of his descriptions, his deceptive simplicity, so free of the intrusive style that… More
The Subtleties of Violence
As in the movies, there are in literature certain kinds of violence that themselves seem to do harm, that seem be acts of violence committed upon the reader as… More
On Wise Blood
As Flannery’s friend, as well as her editor and publisher from the start, I marveled at her excellence as a writer and regretted her early death. I first met… More
Maureen Howard: Leaps of Faith
Your letters had settled into friendship, and you wrote that you were learning to walk on crutches and felt like “a large stiff anthropoid ape who has no… More
The Real Story: Literary Fact and Fiction
CHARLES MCGRATH: It seems fair to say that we’re living in an age of porosity; the traditional boundaries between fact and fiction have become permeable, with factual narratives borrowing techniques… More
One-Legged Walter
One-Legged WalterHe always made me wonder.Eyes crow-footed from sun,on snow.Body slumped,from slack times.He lived in Sullivan’s junk-yard,in a gutted ’51 Chevy.On the floorboard,tattered blankets, neatly sewn together,made his bed.Sunkist… More
The Play’s the Thing: A Discussion
BEGINNINGSCHARLES MEE: I had polio when I was a kid, and up until I was fifteen I had never read anything but comic books. Then a high school English… More
Portable Cultures, Global Identities: Panel Discussion
I knew my friends were right: in school I had learned about my ancestors’ bravery, about how they fought the slave trade successfully. But I hated this history. I… More
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