Henning Mankell's detective is always uneasy around those alien characters (the typographical kind).

If we want to do sociology of literature, let’s get away from texts for a bit.

If asked to select a writer to dine with tonight, I would name C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933), the Greek poet of Alexandria.

What was more dazzling, my view of the Bosphorus with the Aghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque or the conversation? In Istanbul last month I rediscovered what I treasure whenever I go abroad: the well-roundedness and cosmopolitanism of intellectuals in comparison with whom we here appear narrow and specialized.

Are you on the record anywhere about Carlos Ramírez Hoffman or Carlos Weider? That was the indelicate question I kept mulling over—and ultimately kept to myself—during the Q and A session after Raúl Zurita's Sept. 26 poetry reading here at Northwestern University, where Zurita was accompanied by his latest translator, Anna Deeny.

Are we forcing the world to conform to our own image of it? Are we asking foreign authors to fashion pictures of their societies that fulfill our own perceptions, desires, and fears?

There must be something right with a country, when your guide talks to you on your hike outside Bogota about his love for Llosa, Cortázar, Hemingway, Kazantzakis, and Tolstoy. And then at the end of the hike he asks for a list of novels and poets he should read! Am I living in the wrong country or what?

Yet once more, O ye laurels, I consider the last twenty Nobel prizewinners in literature, and once more I turn over the question of literary autonomy...

Let us return once again to the groves of Swedish Academe, and continue contemplating the last twenty Nobel literature lectures...