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
Family Secrets
One of the conditions of being a writer is that all those authors you have loved and learned from, and by necessity have taught yourself to forget, the better… More
First Love
Mrs. Dalloway is the first great book I ever read. I was fifteen, a not very promising student at a not very good public high school in Southern California,… More
Michele Serros: Small-Town Tales
"Small-Town Tales," by Michele Serros, appears in PEN America 4: Fact/Fiction. This talk was presented, in slightly different form, at a PEN Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to John Steinbeck.Small-Town TalesAfter my… More
After the Fall
Without official approval, I should like to dedicate these proceedings to the reading groups and secret Proust readers who are here tonight, and who have produced something called a… More
Father of Choice
Life clung to Samuel Beckett, irritatingly, for eighty-three and three-quarter years. When he told me he’d lost his teeth, I mumbled an inanity: “It could be worse.” Without pause, he… More
Nadine Gordimer: Cross-Pollination
"Cross-Pollination," by Nadine Gordimer, appears in PEN America 2: Home and Away. This talk was originally presented at a Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to Marcel Proust, sponsored by the PEN American… More
Proust Regained
And now a translation of the opening passage composed for this occasion. Those of you who have tried to translate the first sentence will know that it is impossible.… More
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
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
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