Reading Jerzy Kosinski‘s Steps for 12th grade English sent me into a deep (and perversely welcome) funk. The book reflected back, in a more grotesque way than Lorrie Moore’s stories did later, my suspicion that sexual relationships between men and women were inevitably bound for disaster. It also sent me off in search of Kosinski’s other work. I thought of . . .
Sean Carman, our Washington, D.C. correspondent, sends this report. Last Friday the PEN/Faulkner Foundation gave the Bernard Malamud Award for the short story to Tobias Wolff and Adam Haslett. The event, arranged as a polite ceremony to honor the art of the short story, turned into pure literary smackdown, with two masters reading from unpublished manuscripts on the empty . . .