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
Borges Beyond Words
Borges used to tell an endearing story that continues to haunt me. When he was a child, his paternal grandmother lived in the house with his family. She was English;… More
Invigorating Life
A Room of One’s Own must be the most popular book title that any author has ever written. Since its publication in 1929, Virginia Woolf’s witty manifesto has not… 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
Virginia Woolf’s Forgetful Selves
Readers either worship or denigrate Virginia Woolf’s use of stream of consciousness. I will admit that there are times when her characters’ mental ambling can seem frustratingly opaque, and… More
Gregory Rabassa
As one who works at spreading an awareness of what people are writing and saying in other languages through translation, I have long celebrated the labors of PEN American… 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
Confronting the Worst: Writing & Catastrophe
I’m not an expert on natural disaster, but on man-made disaster, namely wars. I assume that all of us have received the same question over and over again: “Why… 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
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
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