Cynthia Oznick, on the occasion of her fœtid bemedalling with the 2008 PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement Award: “Nothing is more poisonous to steady recognition than death: how often is a writer—lauded, fêted, bemedalled—plummeted into eclipse no more than a year or two after the final departure? Who nowadays speaks of Bernard Malamud, once a diadem in…
