Prison writing

Philip Gourevitch, whose most recent book is Standard Operating Procedure (with Errol Morris), is leading a discussion about torture and Abu Ghraib over at the Talking Points Memo Book Club. Joining him are the novelist Robert Stone, poet and essayist Mary Karr, author Rory Stewart, and journalists Jeffrey Goldberg and E.J. Graff.

Turkey continues to send writers and publishers to prison for "insulting the state."

Amitava Kumar points out the poem "On Reserve at the Library," which imagines Paris Hilton as a prison writer.

Also:

Guernica, the online magazine, has put up part one of the conversation between Mia Farrow, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Dinaw Mengestu about the crisis in Darfur, which was an event at the World Voices festival (you can also listen to the whole event).

Via Three Percent, an online documentary about PEN America demigod Jorge Luis Borges, which is, according to one reviewer, "part biography, part literary criticism, part hero-worship, part book reading, and part psychology."

And, lastly, Albert Cossery, an Egyptian writer who lived in Paris and wrote in French, has passed away at age 94. Alyson Waters received a grant from the PEN Translation Fund to translate The Colors of Infamy into English, which I believe will be published by New Directions, though I'm not sure when.

(The image above is a drawing by Fernando Botero, published in the Virginia Quarterly Review.)