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.

Bloggers? Tweeters? My Space? Facebook? Fahgedabodit. Hundreds of years before everyone got on a digital soapbox, diarists used this intimate form to confide their loves, longings, and keen observations about the world around them. Learn more about the diaries currently on view at the Morgan Library here.

On a recent Tuesday, New York Public Radio's Jerome L. Greene Space hosted a literary salon as part of the 2011 PEN World Voices Festival. Download the talk, “From Russia with Love,” featuring Russian poetry, criticism, and classical music here.

China watchers and writers Ian Buruma, Yan Lianke, Linda Polman, David Rieff, and Zha Jianying spoke at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature to discuss human rights in China at the Great Hall at Cooper Union.

One of the most powerful aspects of “War Horse,” which opened at Lincoln Center on April 14, is, of course, the astonishing puppets. At The New School’s Tishman Auditorium, the puppeteers pulled back the curtain during a lively panel discussion and demonstration.

It's fitting that William Shakespeare was born in the spring—April 26, 1564—because his sonnets are crammed with sumptuous images of ripe nature bursting its bounds. The Cornelia Street Café recently celebrated the playwright’s birthday with a reading of selected sonnets. 

A large swatch of artist Laurel Nakadate's work features performances in which she performs acts with strangers—and videotapes them. Nakadate recently discussed her work at UnionDocs as part of New York's "Walls and Bridges" conference.

WNYC was there to hear the conversation photographer Nan Goldin, critic Lynn Tillman and French thinkers Ruwen Ogien and Carole Talon-Hugon had on the intersection of these subjects.

Authors Jessica Hagedorn and Sarah Braunstein read excerpts from novels that set loss in a public context at a recent meeting of the Happy Ending Music and Reading series.

On a recent Saturday, "The Writers Studio Reading Series" celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Yale Review. Listen to Louise Glück, Caryl Phillips, Edmund White and Michael Cunningham read from their work at the event.

The centennial of Williams' birth was honored in a three-part series at the Museum of Arts and Design called The Kindness of Strangeness.

Click hear to listen to the three Story Prize finalists—Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li and Suzanne Rivecca—read from their work.

Bill Callahan, the musician many fans know as Smog, read from his novel, Letters to Emma Bowlcut, on a recent snowy night in Brooklyn.

WNYC recently attended a conversation between novelist, professor and critic Zadie Smith and her new editor at Harper's, Gemma Sieff.