Conversations in Tusculum
By Richard Nelson
Winner of a Pels Foundation Awards for Drama

Cassius: I’m not sure what I’d actually expected—

Brutus: I’m so pleased we’re finally talking about this.

Cassius: I’m always thinking about it. Trying to figure it out. What it means. Or meant. What it says about me.

Brutus: Me too. So . . .

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The Clean House
By Sarah Ruhl
Winner of a Pels Foundation Award for Drama

It has been such a hard month.
My cleaning lady—from Brazil—decided that
   she was depressed
one day and stopped cleaning my house.
I was like: clean my house!
And she wouldn’t!
We took her to the hospital and I had her
   medicated and she
Still Wouldn’t Clean.
And—in the meantime—I’ve been cleaning
   my house!
I'm sorry, but I did not go to medical school
   to clean my own house.

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One dreary December day of heavy rain, Afonso da Maia was sitting in his study reading, when the door flew open; he looked up and saw Pedro standing before him. He was muddy and dishevelled, and in his deathly pale face, beneath his wild hair, his eyes had a glint of madness. The old man sat up, terrified. And Pedro, without a word, threw himself into his father’s arms and burst into terrible sobs.

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The Septembers of Shiraz
By Dalia Sofer
Winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers

Isaac stretches his legs, tapping them with his fingers to help his blood circulate. He is glad to have a sink in his room; he rinses his face several times a day and lies back down. He is also glad to have an ant colony, for which he saves his leftover sugar cubes and bread crumbs, distributing them throughout the day and watching the parade of tiny insects carrying the goods.

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What Happened to the Baby?
By Cynthia Ozick
Winner of the PEN/Nabokov Award

When I was a child, I was often taken to meetings of my Uncle Simon’s society, the League for a Unified Humanity. These meetings, my mother admitted, were not suitable for a ten-year-old, but what was she to do with me?

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Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
By Janet Malcolm
Winner of a Weld Award for Biography

It is generally agreed that without Alice Toklas, Stein might not have had the will to go on writing what for many years almost no one had any interest in reading.

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Lingos I-IX
By Ulf Stolterfoht; translated from the German by Rosmarie Waldrop
Winner of a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

fraught with naught

the unbridled increase of tongues the
constant rattling of words in the morning
the evening the unceasing pulse of things
to think of even in sleep the eternal ham –
mering of phrases like “in sight of night”
by and by begin to fill mouth after mouth.

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Trading Words
By Kimiko Hahn
Winner of a PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry

This morning, sitting in our little kitchen, glossed yellow by the clear sunny day, I heard something like a single crack of thunder. Less than a hour later—T called to tell me a plane crashed info the World Trade Center and M and I ran to our Brooklyn side of the harbor. There, we saw smoke billowing out of two monstrous holes in the Towers—by monstrous I mean several stories high. Then the collapse. Then smoke in our faces. Two planes. Smoke.

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Julia Delaney: The American Version
By Theresa Nelson
Winner of  the Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship

I suppose I will go to hell for biting the nun.

Mary says it’s a mortal sin, for certain.

Never mind. It was worth it. I would bite her again, if I got the chance.

Bill says Pop’s down there frying already, so I won’t be lonesome.

“Julia Catherine Delaney!”

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