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
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
Evenings in Paris
There were no more than twenty or thirty people in the audience. To my surprise, I loved Godot—how could you not? Dick was beaming. I guess this had been… More
Recognitions
I had read no Proust at the time. I was much struck by the freedom from constraint and expectation I suddenly enjoyed. Thereafter, I could complicate my sentences and… 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
The Subtleties of Violence
As in the movies, there are in literature certain kinds of violence that themselves seem to do harm, that seem be acts of violence committed upon the reader as… More
The Day I Finally Met Baldwin
The 1960s opened propitiously for me, and for my country, Nigeria. In 1960 Nigeria freed itself, at last, from British colonial rule. I published my second novel, and proved… More
Parce Que C’était Lui
The little phrase I’m about to read comes from a famous passage in Sodom and Gomorrah when Marcel the narrator is suddenly reminded of his grandmother. He had stayed… More
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
Bad Behavior
Prose fiction was born Protestant. It is a child of the Enlightenment, and though it has some exotic forebears—romance most nearly, drama and poetry further back—it could only have… More
Support for the freedom to read with exclusive designs by Todd Parr, Mike Curato, Art Spiegelman, and more!
