It is rare to meet someone whose every gesture embodies his ideals. Award-winning Iranian-French photojournalist Reza Deghati is such a man. One who, by his own description, “loves to contact people and learn their stories,” he remembered the names of the Blue Met volunteers, and thanked them with the grace usually reserved for luminaries. Packed [...]

Tariq Ali is an Oxford-educated East Asian expatriate who has nevertheless maintained deep ties with his nation of origin. Famed for his silver-tongued oratorical skills, he kept a packed, multi-ethnic audience captivated with his account of American interventions in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, and brought out ripples of laughter and applause with caustic assessments of [...]

Tels des appuis-livres d’un oeuvre littéraire, le tout premier roman nouvellement traduit d’A. S. Byatt L’ombre du soleil discuté dans le face à face francophone du vendredi et le dernier roman The Children’s Book expliqué dans l’entrevue d’Eleanor Wachtel du samedi ont brillamment encadré la carrière de la grande dame de la littérature anglaise. Du [...]

Nicole Brossard and Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood are conferring with one of the festival organizers. It’s already past the hour and there’s a trickle of people still coming in. They are wondering about what language to use to present the duo. The presenter, it seems, is an anglophone. But Brossard shrugs it off, saying ”tout le monde parle [...]

“I was thinking my duty as a writer was to penetrate my pen in the black plastic into which we bury the unidentified dead.” Even in an informal onstage interview with Eleanor Wachtel, A.B. Yehoshua speaks in haunting images. Discussing his two most recent novels, A Woman in Jerusalem and Friendly Fire, Israel’s pre-eminent contemporary [...]