Deranged Punctilio
“I lay inert on the bed and it took three women to put on my trousers. They didn’t seem to take much interest in my private parts, which to… 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
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
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
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
James Baldwin’s Grand Tour
In America I’m not really a private person. No, I’m a public person. And a public person cannot write. Writers always have to find a way to do their… 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
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
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
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
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