The 2012 PEN Literary Awards Ceremony

The 2012 PEN Literary Awards Ceremony was held at CUNYGraduate Center's Proshansky Auditorium on the occasion of the 90th Anniversary of PEN American Center. PEN presented 18 awards, fellowships,… More

The Land at the End of the World

The night—which resembles a notary’s office where resigned third-rank civil servants lie snoring among the sheaves of official papers—transforms the houses and the buildings into sad family vaults inhabited… More

Raceball

Major League Baseball’s drive for profit and control—not its desire to rectify historic wrongs—led it to accept integration. That same lust to maximize revenues and exert dominion over… More

Dah-ling

Tallulah, with her signature “dah-ling”s and her notorious peccadilloes and her endlessly caricaturized baritonal gurgle of a voice—a voice that the actor-writer Emlyn Williams said was “steeped as deep… More

When the King Saved God

Abraham Lincoln lay dying in a room full of educated and literate men, in the age of the wireless telegraph, and not far from the offices of several newspapers,… More

In the Presence of Absence

Love, like meaning, is out on the open road, but like poetry, it is difficult. It requires talent, endurance, and skillful formulation, because of its many stations. It is… More

Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

I did not even know whether the perfume was my reason for being in there or whether it had become an excuse, the mask behind the mask, because if… More

Leaving the Atocha Station

Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest… More