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
The Power of the Pen: Salman Rushdie
A butterfly flaps its wings in India and we feel the breeze on our cheeks in New York. A throat is cleared somewhere in Africa and in California there’s… More
The Power of the PEN: Antonio Munoz Molina
ListenRight in front of me, on a crowded subway train, a woman is reading Marcel Proust. I have never seen her before, and most likely I will never see… 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
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
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
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
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
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