The Weight of Words
Talking about Mishima the writer is difficult without invoking Mishima the individual and Mishima the suicide. A lot of what’s been said tonight—by me principally—is extratextual. The question is:… More
Diverse Realities
Hearing this story, I thought to myself: This is straight out of Gabriel García Márquez. It was an epiphany for me. I suddenly saw García Márquez’s fiction on a… More
The Eternal Present
Many months later, besieged by thoughts of an all-too-foreseeable future as an engineer, which I did not want, I went out one winter for a walk in the snow.… More
Inverted Realism
I remember when I published my first, very unsuccessful novel, a science-fiction novel, which, to the despair of my publishers, I keep telling people not to read. A friend… More
The Real Worlds
Many of us who come from the Caribbean are astounded when people speak of the “implausibility” of magical realism. For in our worldview, as in our much-loved Gabriel García… More
Lost in Translation
The world is invited, commanded, to brood. Place his suicide in a Western context, or in the Japanese one, or in both, where I think it most significantly belongs.… More
Laying It Down
This Langston riff is for that cardigan-sweater-wearin’ blues poet Raymond R. Patterson, Professor Emeritus, CCNY, author of 26 Ways of Looking at a Black Man and Elemental Blues.I found Langston behind his… More
Subject Matter
I am Eikoh Hosoe, a photographer from Tokyo. It is a great honor for me to speak on this special occasion about my collection of photographs of Ba-ra-kei, or… More
Old-Fasioned Virtues
It was the spring of 1970. I was twenty-three years old, writing and translating poems, writing essays and reviews, but also dreaming of one day being able to write… More
Something Radical
In the 1970s I traveled to Cuba for an international writers’ conference. After I had read a paper to an appreciative audience, some of the organizers asked me if… More
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