I was at the AWP conference in Denver this past weekend to give a reading and sign some chapbooks. The mood was cheery, the elevation high, the Colorado Rocky mountains (which I had never seen in person…

This interview with Laura Healy, translator of Roberto Bolaño's poetry, is part of our month long look at international poetry and celebration of the release of The Ecco Anthology of International…

I was late to the Madmen, Exiles, and Savage Detectives: Latin American Poetry panel at the Philoctetes Center this Tuesday. I was late because I was puttering around the fourth floor poetry section at…

If you are in New York City, you must, you absolutely must, attend the Triptych Reading Series. Curated by Iranian-born translator and poet Kaveh Bassiri and poet Mary Austin Speaker, the reading series…

A new bi-monthly magazine celebrating women writers has landed. Belletrista, carved of moonlight, aims to share the varying voices of females internationally and I couldn’t be happier about it.…

Cornelia Street Cafe is a restaurant in the West Village of New York City that has historically been a venue for incredible works of literature to be shared. The walls are blue and lined with mirrors…

What better way to spend a Sunday night in New York then at a “tribute to Kafka” reading, and what better place to do it than the KGB Bar? The KGB is an institution here in New York, for many…

Gerald Martin’s talk on his new work, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life (Knopf) at the Americas Society on Park Avenue this past week was as magical as one would have guessed anything involving Marquez…

The Faith & Fiction panel at the Powerhouse Arena felt like a transcendental experience altogether. The Arena is made up of giant glass windows for walls, and stands hidden at the foot of the East…

The PEN Cabaret at FIAF (French Institute Alliance Française ) last night was both intense and wonderful. Performers, poets, writers, readers, musicians, film makers, actors, PEN members, and countless…

It is not everyday a person has the pleasure of seeing Mark Harman, Richard Howard and Sarah Ruden together in one place. Mark Harman, responsible for Kafka’s Amerika and many other Kafka translations,…

According to curator Paul North, never in history has there been an event on German publishers exiled by the Third Reich in one show. íOur task tonight is to bring a group of publishers into view,ë…

Sant Jordi is Barcelona’s Valentine’s Day. Seven million Catalans went out and partied all day and all night. In the streets, on the brick and cobblestone, in lovers’ and loved ones’…

I am going to try to explain Oulipo. It is a thing which very seriously exists, and perhaps does not yet exist, because you he she they I have not yet exhausted all of its possibilities. If there is one…

Last Thursday's Keret event at Idlewild was a hoot. Miriam Shlesinger's discussion about translating Keret's use of slang, though she is over twenty years his senior, (Keret is 42), was hilarious.…

I remember the first time I came across Etgar Keret, and that I threw the book across the room. I had been beat to the punch. This marvel, this oracle, this as we say in Yiddish, this “meshuga”…

Poet Jorie Graham once said, “It is the poet's dream to communicate. To say what we're really saying.” And if you think about how hard it is to truly come clean in your own sentence,…