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
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
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
Aerial Maneuvers
Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, the book of his I love most, has accompanied me through life as a sort of moral and political manifesto. It may seem… 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
Real People: Dorothy Allison on Steinbeck
You write like a man, I was told. No, I write like a dyke. Except—except sometimes I try to write like John Steinbeck. I try to go from everyday… More
Paul Auster on Samuel Beckett: Laughter in the Dark
We went on to talk about other things, and then, out of the blue, ten or fifteen minutes later, apropos of nothing, he leaned forward across the table and… More
Lifetimes Out of Moments
A small boat crowded to the gunnels with journalists met the docking of Gertrude Stein’s steamship in New York. Her name ran like an illuminated rabbit around Times Square.… More
Laughter in the Dark
We went on to talk about other things, and then, out of the blue, ten or fifteen minutes later, apropos of nothing, he leaned forward across the table and… More
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