2nd PEN Cabaret. Saturday night, May 3, Webster Hall.

The disembodied voice of Hungarian singer Bea Palya filled the darkness at the venerable night club Webster Hall as she emerged from the back alongside the audience, singing raw, no microphone, no spotlight, in a chillingly eloquent voice. She was the most self-contained of all the performers at PEN's second cabaret. (Writers, containing multitudes, are rarely as comfortable within their own fleshly bodies as she.) Palya took a microphone, singing playfully in front of the first table (where Rick Moody slumped as if to escape the unexpected shared spotlight, although he was onstage later with John Wesley Harding, aka novelist Wesley Stace)).

Palya took the stage, taught the audience to sing and clap along (not ready for floor stamping,...

Jane Austen wrote about private lives, nary a hint of the Napoleonic Wars. Not an option for writers today; the public world intrudes, Salman Rushdie reminded us in his welcome at Wednesday night's "Public Lives/Private Lives" reading at Town Hall. (Rushdie began with a warm "You're back!" The PEN World Voice Fest he launched four years ago has legs.)  Rushdie, who later described himself as "the punctuation," knows how to get on and off stage with dispatch. A noble gift.

Highlights of the evening:

 Before launching into a poem and an excerpt from his latest novel, Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje quoted Kinky Friedman: "There is a fine line between fiction and nonfiction, and I believe ... I snorted it in 1976," drawing a few snorts from the audience.

Rushing onstage, Annie Prioux, announced she was not...