With my second cataract operation behind me, I’m amazed at how much my sight has improved (and I’m also adjusting to my new cyborg self, now that I host a plastic lens in each eye). For a while, though, I found it difficult to read, with most texts looking like this

unless I closed one [...]

Now that I’m recovering from cataract surgery, I find that I can’t read for more than short stretches of time, and I’m reminded of how essential to my day are the acts of reading and writing. I’m the sort of person who carries a book along wherever I go, on the chance that I’ll [...]

When I was a college student I used to work as a cab driver in New York City.
My first week on the job was a disastrous time. Every single cab I’d been assigned had broken down: the first night, a tire blew out; the second, the engine overheated, steam rising from [...]

Blinded by an accident when he was six years old, the French memoirist Jacques Lusseyran learned to prefer his blind life over his previous sighted experience. “I no longer saw faces, and knew in all probability I should go through life without seeing them,” he wrote of those early sightless days, in his book [...]

We all know just how messy it is to write, how much guessing, and chance, and simple due diligence through an intractable problem will get us to where we need to go. But through all the joyful and painful mess of creation, structure somehow does get its say. Patterns do begin to emerge, [...]

I read, and read obsessively, in search of transformation, of following any author’s eyes to a new angle on the world–for me, that’s entertainment.
One author who does this consistently is Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist who won the 2005 Man Booker International Prize and is year after year shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature. [...]

Recently my Portuguese pal Paulo Dias Figueiredo introduced me to the work of Ruy Belo, a poet who Paulo claims is second only in 20th century Portuguese stature to the poet Fernando Pessoa (and I realize that I haven’t yet posted anything about Pessoa–I will soon). After reading a clutch of poems by Belo, [...]

Recently one of my students mentioned in class that she felt she included too much detail in her stories, that she never knew how to focus on what to keep and what to leave out.
I responded that she did indeed know how to do this, and that she did so every minute of every day. [...]

When J.M.G. Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2008, I’m sad to have to admit that I was one of those who wondered, “Who the hell is he?”
I read a good deal of international literature, and so I was surprised his name had never crossed my path. Well, my fault, my [...]

The longer I write, the more I’m intrigued by how a word can conceal as much if not far more than it reveals. Yet if regarded with care, any word can serve not as a wall but as a window to what it can’t further express.
One of my favorite books is The Hundred Greatest [...]