This month, Happy Ending Music and Reading series curator Amanda Stern welcomed three Yaddo alums to Joe’s Pub for a program entitled “Reality and Scandal.”

The Asia Society inaugurated its new Asian Arts & Ideas series this month with “The ‘Chindia’ Dialogues." Listen to a conversation between historian Jonathan Spence and the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh.

The poet Anne Sexton took her own life in 1974, but had she lived, this year would have marked her 83rd birthday. Reason enough, thought the actor Paul Hecht, to organize an elegant tribute to her at the Cornelia Street Café on Nov. 14.

Happy Ending Music & Reading series host and curator Amanda Stern decided on “Frustration” as the theme of her series opener, inviting authors Seth Fried, Jesse Ball, and Paul La Farge to vent. Listen to the audio here.

Two famed poets, essayists and translators — Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger — recently read from new work at the True Story: Non-Fiction reading series at the KGB Bar in the East Village. Listen to the audio here.

Actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, actor Kathryn Grody, writers Amitav Ghosh and Deborah Eisenberg, and former political prisoner Law Eh Soe read from Nowhere to Be Home: Narratives from Survivors of Burma's Military Regime at a recent event at the Asia Society.

Journalist Janet Malcolm and New Yorker writer Ian Frazier discussed the nature of the journalist/interviewee relationship, the impact of technology on their work, and early writing projects at The New Yorker Festival.

Philip Schultz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Failure," among other books of verse, has written an unexpected work of prose called "My Dyslexia."

“Les chose sont contre nous” ("Things are against us") is the wry slogan of Paul Jennings’ parodic philosophy resistentialism*. But Professor Jane Bennett of Johns Hopkins University doesn’t think so. (*For more on resistentialism, check out: Paul Jennings, "Report on Resistentialism," The Jenguin Pennings, 1963.)

In honor of its 50th birthday, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) brought together company founder Sir Peter Hall and current Artistic Director Michael Boyd in conversation at the Park Avenue Armory where the RSC is currently in residence.

The second of four panel discussions held in conjunction with the Royal Shakespeare Company residency at The Park Avenue Armory focused on “Directing Shakespeare."

As the Middle East continues to feel the tremors of revolution from all across the landscape, Dr. Reza Aslan’s book “Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East” offers a timely look at the role of literature in modern Islam.

Peter Brook was a legendary director with the Royal Shakespeare Company (R.S.C.) in the 1960s and 1970s; Michael Boyd is the current Artistic Director. The two were recently brought together in the first of a series of discussions being presented by the Park Avenue Armory in conjunction with the R.S.C.’s summer residency.

The Happy Ending Music & Reading Series June 8 performance at Joe’s Pub marked the launch of Happy Ending’s partnership with Yaddo, an artists’ working community based in Saratoga Springs, New York.

A recent Happy Ending Music and Reading Series focused on (modern) legends and beliefs. Listen to readings from Tea Obreht, Dean Bakopoulos, and Fernanda Eberstadt here.

Is the pen mightier than the sword, or any number of other challenges? That’s what “A Working Day,” at the PEN World Voices Festival set out to explore on April 28.

New Orleans manages to leave a mark, good or bad, on its tourists, natives, and those who've decided to take up roots there. Most people who visit have a great time, but many can attest to how the city's unique insular culture, history and traditions can be as frustrating as they are fascinating. As part of the 2011 Pen World Voices Festival of International Literature, five distinguished New Orleans writers — Sarah Broom, Richard Campanella, Nicholas Lemann, Fatima Sheik and Billy Sothern — recently read selections from their published books and essays.

Listen to the audio of a PEN World Voices Festival panel at the Standard Hotel. Writers and editors talked about the ways in which corporate publishing limited access to audiences, the pressure to mainstream, and editing as a form of censorship.

Reality. "Some people live in it, some people don't," observed Happy Ending host and curator Amanda Stern on Wednesday, May 4 at Joe's Pub before introducing three writers with different takes on the subject. The topic seemed a fitting flourish to a week that included both a fairy tale wedding and the death of an international terrorist—each event both fantastic and true.