1,001 Laughs
1,001 LaughsBack in the thirties, Borges worked for an Argentinean womens’ magazine called El Hogar—a magazine of middle-class attitudes and presumptions, roughly similar to Redbook in America today. I… More
All the Range
Borges was an immensely prolific writer who never wrote anything long, and what he mainly wrote, besides his thousand pages of short stories and around five hundred poems, was… More
Nothing Simple
After his death, when I visited Buenos Aries with my wife, Paula Cooper, it was remarkable to stay in a hotel next door to a building that Borges once… More
Language of Labyrinth
A young aspiring writer, I discovered the work of Borges at about the same time that I began to read Beckett. Neither of these writers indicated directions I believed… More
Rosario Ferré: Reaching the Center
"Reaching the Center" was featured in PEN America 1: Classics, and was presented at a centenary celebration of Jorge Luis Borges, sponsored by the PEN Forums Committee and the New… More
The Imaginary Real
Pieces ranging from the metaphysical to the fanciful to the concrete to the comical are all realistic, in that they show us more about what it is to be… More
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
The Way We Love Now: Antoine Audouard
“The way we love now.” I mean, who is “we”? Emily Dickinson: “That love is all there is, is all we know of love.” Okay? That pretty well does… More
Confronting the Worst: Writing & Catastrophe
Listen.I’d like to remember the great Chekhov and his play Three Sisters. The main character in that play says over and over, “Now life is terrible, we live in… More
The Way We Love Now: Meir Shalev
When we talk about love, it’s part of an international conspiracy: Writers know something about love that readers do not. The same way rabbis and priests and imams know… More