PEN America

Don't miss: The 'Chindia' Dialogues

2011-11-02T11:28:00.001-04:00

Coming up this weekend: Asia Society will bring 20 leading authors and critical thinkers from China and India to NYC to engage in vital literary and cultural dialogue, as part of the inaugural Asian Arts & Ideas Forum: The 'Chindia' Dialogues. Here are two events not to miss:

UNDERGROUND & UNDERCOVER: LITERARY REPORTAGE
Friday, November 4, 12:30-2:00 PM
Free. No reservation required.
Featuring Siddhartha Deb, Yu Hua, Murong Xuecun, and Zha Jianying

Literary reporters bear witness to the effects of modernization – from massive internal migration and the commercialization of culture to the ravages of corruption and environmental degradation – with novelist/essayist Yu Hua (China In Ten Words); author and media critic Zha Jianying (Tide Players, and a participant in PEN's 2011 World Voices Festival event: China in Two Acts); Siddhartha Deb, who survived a stint as a “cybercoolie” at a call center in Mumbai to write The Beautiful and the Damned; and China’s pioneering cyber novelist-turned-investigative journalist Murong Xuecun (best-selling novel, Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu), who reported on a mafia-style “direct-selling” pyramid scam in Jiangxi that exposed the inequities in China's capitalistic development. Moderated by Orville Schell, Director of Asia Society’s Center for U.S-China Relations.

Asia Society is located at 725 Park Avenue at 70th Street (directions)│212-517-ASIA│www.AsiaSociety.org/artsandideas

AMITAV GHOSH IN CONVERSATION WITH JONATHAN SPENCE
Thursday, November 3, 6:30-8:00 PM
Tickets purchasable here. $15 (non-members), $12 (students/seniors), $10 (members)

Oneof India’s best known writers, AmitavGhosh, joins leading Chinese scholar andSterling Professor of History at Yale Jonathan Spence to discuss Ghosh’s landmarkhistorical novel, River of Smoke (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux,October 2011), the Sino-Indian relations during the Opium Wars, and therelevance of the legacy of capitalism and colonialism to Asia’s emerging rolein the 21st Century. Introduced by OrvilleSchell, Director of Asia Society’s Centerfor U.S.-China Relations.

Asia Society is located at 725 Park Avenue at 70th Street (directions)│212-517-ASIA│www.AsiaSociety.org/artsandideas

For a complete list of 'Chindia' events, visit Asia Society's Calendar

Brian Dettmer: Solo Show in Chicago

2011-11-01T15:40:00.000-04:00

If you happen to be in the Chicago area between Nov. 4 through 20, don't miss Paper Back, Brian Dettmer's solo show at the Packer Shopf Gallery:

Here's a quotation from Brian's artist's statement:

The book’s intended function has decreased and the form remains linear in a non-linear world. By altering physical forms of information and shifting preconceived functions, new and unexpected roles emerge. This is the area I currently operate in. Through meticulous excavation or concise alteration I edit or dissect communicative objects or systems such as books, maps, tapes and other media. The medium’s role transforms. Its content is recontextualized and new meanings or interpretations emerge.

Brian's art graced the cover and inner pages of PEN America: The Good Books. Learn more about his surgical processes by watching this CBS Evening News report and by reading "Postmodern Deconstruction" from The New Yorker.

New Members New Books

2011-11-01T12:12:00.002-04:00

Tonight PEN will be welcoming its newest members at PowerHouse Arena. Among them are poets Sandra Beasley, whose poem "Unit of Measure" is a must-read, and Terrence A. Hayes, a judge of this year's PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. Also, check out an interview with new member Teju Cole on his novel Open City, and an excerpt from frequent Festival participant, Peter Godwin's The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe.

PEN Contributors Featured at AAWW Literary Festival

2011-11-01T10:18:00.000-04:00

The Asian American Writers Workshop Literary Festival happened this weekend, and some of PEN America’s favorite authors were honored!

Frequent contributor Jessica Hagedorn received the Lifetime Achievement Award. Check out her response for issue 14’s forum.

Favorite poet Kimiko Hahn, recipient of the 2008 PEN/Voelker Award for Poetry, was honored for her collection Toxic Flora.

Check out Amitava Kumar’s essay, “A Collaborator in Kashmir” from PEN America Issue 10, and support him at the festival this weekend—his book A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb won the nonfiction award.

For more information about the prizewinners and the festival click here.

(credit: Marion Ettlinger)

The Good Books

2011-06-16T11:49:00.012-04:00

Selections from PEN America 14: The Good Books are now online! Here are a few of things you can check out over at PEN.org:

Forum: The Good Books
Welcome to the World's Greatest Book Swap: writers sharing books that they love--what could be better? We were blown away by the thoughtful responses we received, and by how many! Over fifty writers participated in our virtual swap. We've posted a few, with more to come. For now, have a look at Maurice Berger on Roland Barthes's Mythologies and Barack Obama; Srikanth Reddy on Chinese Tales and translating a translated translation; Rabih Alameddine on The Book of Disquiet and the many heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa.

The 1986 PEN Congress, 25 years later
We culled through almost 3,000 pages of previously unpublished transcripts to bring you highlights from a literary event spearheaded by Norman Mailer and featuring Arthur Miller, Nadine Gordimer, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison, Czeslaw Milosz, and many more. (Check out Rhoda Koenig's long write-up of the event in New York Magazine for some of the glamor and gossip surrounding the '86 Congress.)

Among the pieces we included is one we call "From Voice to Voice," in which remarks by Saul Bellow touch off responses from Allen Ginsberg, Nadine Gordimer, Susan Sontag--but enough with my name-dropping, go have a look yourself. And make sure to read "From the Floor," too, in which Grace Paley and Margaret Atwood protest the under-representation of women writers at the Congress (and Norman Mailer offers his perhaps inflammatory rebuttal).

World Voices
The issue also features fiction, poetry, and essays by some of the participants in this year's PEN World Voices Festival, including Marcelo Figueras, Asaf Schurr, Najat El Hachmi. And there are three essays from Finding the Words, an anthology compiled by our sister chapter PEN Canada: Pasha Malla & Moez Surani assemble an "Ethical Code for Writers," Alain de Botton revisits places of unexpected inspiration in "On Writing," and Madeleine Thien ghost-hunts through Cambodia and Vietnam in "Photocopies of Photocopies: On Bao Ninh."

Artwork
What's the sound of a sword cutting into a book? A book being sliced? Paper falling? ZAK, SHAKA, BARA BARA. Check out Book, a great comic by Yuichi Yokoyama with awesome onomatopoeic translations by Taro Nettleton. There's more book slicing and dicing to be seen in the sculptures of Brian Dettmer (our wonderful cover artist), and some quotation re-appropriation by Jenny Holzer.

As usual, you can find all of this and more if you subscribe to PEN America or purchase a copy of the journal.

Don DeLillo's Short Stories

2011-06-08T11:43:00.012-04:00

Earlier this week, The Millions reported that Don Delillo would be releasing his first ever collection of short stories this November, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. The stories are drawn from the years 1979-2011; many of them first appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, and Harper's. (You can see a full list of Delillo's short fiction here.)

Among the stories is "Human Moments in World War III," which was reprinted in PEN America 13: Lovers after DeLillo received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction last year (the story first appeared in Esquire in 1983).

The story was accompanied by PEN Q&A with DeLillo, in which he talks about Bellow, American fiction, technology, the role of the writer, and more. You can read the opening of "Human Moments in World War III" here; the Q&A is here.

Praise for Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

2011-06-01T12:15:00.012-04:00

In The New York Times Book Review this past Sunday there's a great piece by August Kleinzahler, "Rebirth of a Poet," which praises Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's translation of Songs of Kabir. More so than his predecessors, Mehrotra manages to "[capture] the ferocity and improvisational energy of Kabir's poetry."

Kleinzahler includes quotations from the poems "Friend" and "It's a Mess," both of which were included in PEN America 11: Make Believe, and read by Paul Auster during the issue's launch party.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was a recipient of a PEN Translation Fund Grant in 2009, the same year that he was nominated for the chair of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, alongside Ruth Padel and Derek Walcott. (Here's a Times article about the unusually controversial race.)

The PEN Translation Fund provides grants to support the translation of book-length works of fiction, creative nonfiction, drama, and poetry that have not previously appeared in English or have appeared only in egregiously flawed translation. Read more about PEN's Translation Committee here.

If you haven't already, check out the online feature for PEN America 11: Make Believe. You can purchase the issue and any of our other issues, or become a subscriber, by clicking here.

(Photograph of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra courtesy of The Telegraph.)

The Great Global Book Swap

2011-05-23T12:38:00.006-04:00

The launch event for PEN America 14: The Good Books is now online. Colum McCann kicked it off by reading Rabih Alameddine’s lovely contribution to the forum, in which Rabih imagines bringing The Book of Disquiet to a hotel in Lisbon.

After Colum’s reading, I spoke to Leila Aboulela, Nathacha Appanah, and Rahul Bhattacharya about the books each of them would bring to their own imaginary book swaps. Leila brought Tayeb Salih’s The Wedding of Zein (which she has read multiple times in both Arabic and English—sometimes wanting to read it in one language, sometimes preferring the other), Nathacha brought Beyond Despair, three lectures by Aharon Appelfeld (who, as Nathacha noted, was born in what is now the Ukraine with German as his first language but chose to write in Hebrew), and Rahul brought Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel García Márquez (Rahul’s reading of the book's conclusion was one of the highlights of the event).

You can watch the whole thing below:

You can also now order both the print edition and the Kindle edition of PEN America 14: The Good Books. Stay tuned for highlights from the issue, coming soon.

Friday event for PEN America 14: The Good Books

2011-04-25T15:06:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned last week, the first copies of PEN America 14: The Good Books arrived in New York today. We'll have excerpts to read online after the festival is over, but if you're in New York, you'll find copies at select World Voices events -- including "The Great Global Book Swap," a reading and conversation we're holding on Friday in connection with the new issue.

For the Friday event, Leila Aboulela, Nathacha Appanah, Mario Bellatín, and Rahul Bhattacharya have chosen books they read in translation that meant a great deal to them as readers and writers. They will read short excerpts from their selections and discuss why they chose the books they did -- and we'll also discuss the larger subject of literature in translation around the world. Collectively, our Friday panelists have lived in France, India, Mexico, Mauritius, Qatar, Scotland, Sudan, and at least one or two other places as well.

This is a live version of our new issue's forum, in which over 50 writers (among them: Madison Smartt Bell, Amitava Kumar, Yiyun Li, Karen Russell, Lynne Tillman, and many more) imagine they've been invited to a great global book swap, and must bring one book in translation. There are many wonderful choices beautifully explained, and we'll be sharing a number of those pieces here and at PEN.org in the weeks to come.

In the meantime, I hope you can join us on Friday. Here are the full details:

When: Friday, April 29
Where: Scandinavia House, 58 Park Ave., New York City
What time: 2–3:30 p.m.

With Leila Aboulela, Nathacha Appanah, Mario Bellatín, and Rahul Bhattacharya
Free and open to the public. No reservations required.

Co-sponsored by Scandinavia House and PEN America

Imagine you are invited to a great global book swap and have to bring just one beloved book originally written in a foreign tongue: what would it be? Join five eminent writers who have trotted the globe and lived everywhere from Mexico to Mauritius, India to Sudan, for a reading and a talk about the works of translation that enriched and changed their lives.

PEN World Voices next week!

2011-04-22T14:33:00.004-04:00

Issue #14 of PEN America will arrive on Monday -- with copies going out to subscribers, PEN members, and bookstores shortly after -- along with news here about all the great stuff that's in it. In the meantime, a few highlights from the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, happening in New York City all next week.

These are ticketed events with limited seating, so if you're interested you should act soon. There are also many free events, next week; have a look at the whole schedule.

*

Revolutionaries in the Arab World

Wednesday, April 27, 7:30 p.m.
92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center

Hear from experts and on-the-ground bloggers how social media and citizen journalism galvanize the revolution. In the borderless world of the Internet, where revolutionary ideas spread at lightning speed, will other despotic regimes collapse? Which ones? And how does an autocracy transition into a democracy, and at what cost? Alex Nunns, editor of Tweets from Tahrir -- a collection of key tweets from the activists who brought heady days of revolution to Egypt in early 2011 -- will be joined by Palestinian author/journalist Rula Jebreal (Miral), blogger Issandr El Amrani (The Arabist), Moroccan writer Abdellah Taia, and Moroccan-Dutch writer Adbelkader Benali to tackle these urgent questions.

Tickets: $20/$15 PEN Members, students with valid ID.

*

China in Two Acts

Thursday, April 28, 7 p.m.
The Cooper Union, Great Hall

Born in Beijing and educated in the United States, New Yorker contributor Zha Jianying delivers unique insight into the rapidly changing world inside China, including the plights of the country's best-known artist Ai Wei Wei and Nobel peace Prize winner and political prisoner Liu Xiaobo. In a 30-minute presentation, Zha sheds light on the polarized political order and the cultural forces that are shaping the world’s most populous nation. Following Zha’s remarks, a panel of journalists and writers join her on stage for a lively debate of her assertions.

Tickets: $15/$10 PEN Members, students with valid ID.

Note: The Chinese governemnt has barred Liao Yiwu from attending the festival. Read more here.

*

Poetry: The Second Skin
Friday, April 29, 7:30 pm
92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center

An evening of poetry and music curated and emceed by Laurie Anderson. With a stellar line-up of international poets, including John Burnside (Scotland), Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua), David-Dephy Gogibedashvili (Georgia), Hasina Gul (Pakistan), Yusef Komunyakaa (US), Juan Carlos Mestre (Spain), Joachim Sartorius (Germany), and Pia Tafdrup (Denmark).

Tickets: $25/$20 PEN and PSA Members, students with valid ID.

PEN Translation grants: applications due February 3

2011-01-18T14:30:00.005-05:00

Applications for grants from the PEN Translation Fund are due in two weeks. Grants range from $2,000 to $10,000 and support the translation of book-length works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or drama that have not previously appeared in English or have appeared only in an egregiously flawed translation.

In addition to financial assistance, grants from the PEN Translation Fund provide a good bit of publicity: recognition by the Fund has led on numerous occasions to a publishing contract. Translations supported by PEN grants have been excerpted in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review -- and, of course, in PEN America.

February 3rd is also the deadline for most other PEN Awards. You can find out more information here.

Submissions for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Sports Writing, and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Award are due by March 3rd.

Next week: Stoppard, Doctorow, DeLillo & the Belarus Free Theater

2011-01-12T11:55:00.006-05:00

Just a few weeks ago, the members of the Belarus Free Theater were either in jail or in hiding. Now they are performing their play Being Harold Pinter as part of the Under the Radar Festival in New York. Soon they will be back in Belarus, where they will continue to risk the wrath of President Aleksandr Lukashenko, the man known as “Europe’s last dictator.”

On the eve of their return to Minsk, the Belarus Free Theater joins internationally-acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard, PEN American Center, and a stellar supporting cast for an evening celebrating artistic freedom and the courage of hundreds of writers, artists, journalists, and intellectuals targeted in Lukashenko’s latest crackdown following the nation’s flawed December elections.

Czech musician Iva Bittova and American actor Billy Crudup will join Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Tom Stoppard, and surprise guests for a farewell gathering featuring literature, music, and cocktail conversation about the power of art and the future of Belarus.

Viva the Belarus Free Theater

When: Wednesday, January 19, 7 p.m.
Where: Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, New York City
Who: Billy Crudup, E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Tom Stoppard, Iva Bittova, the Belarus Free Theater, and surprise guests

Tickets: $25. Visit lepoissonrouge.com.

All proceeds to benefit the Belarus Free Theater.

(Photograph of the Belarus Free Theatre performing in London taken by Keith Pattison.)

Dispatch from Oslo: Larry Siems

2010-12-10T12:11:00.017-05:00

I had the honor of attending the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo today as an official representative of PEN American Center. The ceremony, with its empty chair representing imprisoned writer and laureate Liu Xiaobo, was stunning and perfectly pitched in an especially Norwegian way—austere and straightforward, principled and direct. There were three particularly sustained, heartfelt ovations: when Nobel Committee Chair Thorbjørn Jagland said, early in his speech, that the response of the Chinese government to the award has in a sense validated the award; when he said Liu has done nothing wrong and must be released; and when he placed the Nobel medal and citation on Liu’s empty chair. I sat near many of our Independent Chinese PEN Center colleagues and other legendary dissidents and activists, and right next to the daughter of Wang Bingzhang, a prominent pro-democracy activist now in his eighth year of a life sentence in China; you can just imagine what the ceremony meant to her and to them.

Two other huge highlights, post-ceremony: I visited a preview of the exhibition on Liu Xiaobo at the Nobel Peace Center that will open tomorrow. I was overwhelmed when I walked into the room, glanced over to the first wall you see, and there were three video monitors playing, from left to right, Liu Xia speaking in Beijing in March 2010, PEN’s New Year’s Eve rally, and Liu Xiaobo talking about freedom of expression. Across the room, flanking an enormous, beautiful photo of Liu, were two banners, one with Jeffrey Yang’s translation of Liu’s poem “Daybreak” and one with Don DeLillo’s text for Liu. There it was, for the world, so much of all of PEN’s amazing work.

Also touring the exhibition preview was Nancy Pelosi; as she was leaving she gave an impromptu press conference, in which she spoke with incredible humanity and passion about what this day means for so many who have worked (as she has) for so long to bring attention to China’s human rights record. Generous, eloquent, clearly moved by the ceremony and the exhibition, she did us all proud.

Here’s to Liu Xiaobo. Here’s to freedom of expression in China.

Larry Siems is the Freedom to Write and International Programs Director at PEN American Center.

Photographs, from top to bottom: Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony, Larry Siems; Nobel Peace Prize Exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center, Larry Siems; Torchlight Procession outside Oslo's Grand Hotel, where the laureate typically greets well-wishers, Marian Botsford Fraser.

More poetry by Liu Xiaobo

2010-12-09T11:15:00.009-05:00

Today, The New York Times ran an excerpt from “Experiencing Death,” a poem by Liu Xiaobo, translated by Jeffrey Yang.

From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash
I’ve drained the drink of the martyrs, sense spring’s
about to break into the brocade-brilliance of myriad flowers

Deep in the night, empty road
I’m biking home
I stop at a cigarette stand
A car follows me, crashes over my bicycle
some enormous brutes seize me
I’m handcuffed eyes covered mouth gagged
thrown into a prison van heading nowhere

Read the rest. The poem is from a collection of elegiac poems remembering the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, and Jeffrey will be translating the whole book for Graywolf Press, as reported today in the Star Tribune:

June Fourth Elegies is an intense collection, its translator, Jeffrey Yang, said Wednesday. It is divided into 20 sections, each relating to the June 4, 1989, massacre at Tiananmen Square.

“The way the book is structured, the poems were written kind of at the same time every year, when Tiananmen happened,” Yang said. “Each one is a kind of recollection of a certain aspect of June 4. They’re very elegiac. The original title of the book in Chinese is literally something like Remembering Six Four.”

You can learn more about Liu Xiaobo at www.PEN.org/liu. You can read more of his poetry here and here—at that second link you can also hear his poems read by Paul Auster, Edward Albee, Don DeLillo, and E.L. Doctorow. (That second group of poems was first published in PEN America 11: Make Believe.) An essay he wrote about the internet in China was published in the (London) Times. (Update: a collection Liu’s political writings will also be published in English next year, by Harvard University Press.)

You can also watch Liu Xiaobo himself discuss freedom of expression here, and here you can watch several PEN writers read both his poetry and the seven sentences cited by the court in China when sentencing him to eleven years in prison.

(Photo from Decembe r 31, 2009 rally at the New York Public Library by Bria n Montopoli.)

All Along the Silk Road: Music and Literature from China

2010-11-30T15:18:00.007-05:00

This Saturday, PEN, WNYC, and PianoCulture.com present the second installment of their literary and musical collaboration: “All Along the Silk Road,” featuring a piano performance by Fei-Fei Dong, a reading by Gish Jen, and a tea tasting that will include Chinese snacks.

The event will take place at 7 pm in WNYC’s lovely and intimate Greene Space at 44 Charlton Street in downtown Manhattan. Tickets are available here, and full details are below. Hope you can make it.

When: Saturday, December 4, 7 pm
Where: The Greene Space at WNYC, 44 Charlton St., New York City
Who: Fei-Fei Dong and Gish Jen; hosted by Ina Parker-Howard

PEN America 13: Lovers

2010-11-16T14:48:00.008-05:00

Who is dear to you? The new issue of PEN America—at the printer now; you can order it here—considers that question through fiction, poetry, short essays, comics, and conversations. Among the highlights:

* Patti Smith talks with talks with Jonathan Lethem about her love for William Blake, John Coltrane, Allen Ginsberg, and more.

* Don DeLillo’s 1983 “Human Moments in World War III” imagines the loneliness of a man in space, meditating on his fading connection to his old planet. Alongside this story is a Q & A on writing, technology, religion, and paranoia, conducted by fax (as you can see, DeLillo crafted his elegant answers on a typewriter).

* Writers salute their literary loves in the issue’s forum (and, online, readers can describe their own). Among the contributions: Yusef Komunyakaa on Frederick Douglass, Anne Landesman on J.M. Coetzee, Lily Tuck on Joan Didion, John Barth on his four fictional “navigation-stars,” and Jessica Hagedorn on Roberto Bolaño.

* Several new short stories, including “The Pretty Grown Together Children,” in which Megan Mayhew Bergman conjures the voice of conjoined twins, and “Before the Next World Cup,” Eshkol Nevo’s story of friends who consider the future with the aid of the world’s favorite sporting event.

* John Ashbery translates Rimbaud's Illuminations (print only), and also contributes a beautiful new poem, “Resettlement.” The issue also features poems by Faraj Bayrakdar, Akinwumi Isola, Natalia Sannikova, and more.

As an exclusive online feature, we’ve also put together a gallery by Daisy Rockwell, aka Lapata, called “The Rasas of Terror.” Rockwell’s painting Couple graces the cover, pictured above.

There’s much more in the issue itself, which you can order here—or better yet, subscribe, and get a free copy of the 2010 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, featuring Alice Munro, Annie Proulx, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and other great writers.

Talib Kweli, Junot Diaz, Wally Lamb and more: Prison Writing Benefit, November 1

2010-10-21T12:13:00.004-04:00

On Monday, November 1, at 7 pm, in New York City, Talib Kweli (pictured right), Junot Díaz, Lisa Dierbeck, Wahida Clark, Barbara Parsons, Sean Dalpiaz, Wally Lamb, and more will gather for a benefit reading and reception to support the PEN Prison Writing Program—which, since 1971, has sponsored an annual writing contest, published a free handbook about writing for prisoners, provided one-on-one mentoring to inmates whose writing shows merit or promise, conducted workshops for former inmates, and sought to get inmates’ work to the public through literary publications and readings.

(We have frequently published work by the finalists and winners of the contest in PEN America; see, for example, Chris Everley’s excellent “Hook Island Traveler,” published in PEN America 9: Checkpoints.)

A reception will follow the reading of fiction, poetry, and memoir by men and women who have participated in the PEN Prison Writing Program. We hope you’ll join us. Full details are below.

Breakout: Voices from Inside

When: Monday, November 1, 7 p.m.
Where: Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St., New York City
Tickets: Collaborator: $75 (limited quantity); Friend: $50. Please be advised that there is a 2 item order minimum. Purchase tickets at lepoissonrouge.com.

Collaborator ticket covers the expenses of one-on-one mentoring services between a PEN Member and an incarcerated man or woman for one year. This premier ticket includes the best views and a reception following the program.

Friend ticket covers the postage and printing costs to provide eight incarcerated men and women with a free copy of PEN’s Handbook for Writers in Prison. This ticket includes a reception following the program.

Tomorrow night: Censorhip by Bullet in Mexico

2010-10-18T12:28:00.004-04:00

Tomorrow night, American and Mexican writers and journalists—including Paul Auster, Calvin Baker, Don DeLillo, Laura Esquivel, and Francine Prose—will gather at Cooper Union to call attention to and discuss “censorship by bullet” in Mexico—the silencing of reporters investigating violence and corruption connected with the drug trade. At least eight journalists have been murdered in Mexico in 2010 alone; many more have been kidnapped, threatened, or disappeared.

Also reading tomorrow evening are Jose Zamora, Víctor Manuel Mendiola, and Luis Miguel Aguilar. After the readings, Carmen Aristegui of CNN en Español, Rocio Gallegos of El Diario de Juárez, and José Luis Martínez of Milenio Diario will talk about the situation in their country; the conversation will be moderated by Julia Preston of The New York Times.

State of Emergency: Censorship by Bullet in Mexico

When: Tueday, October 19, 7 p.m.

Where: The Great Hall Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street, NYC

Tickets: $15/$10 for PEN Members and students with valid ID. Visit www.smarttix.com or call (212) 868-4444. Tickets also available at the door. Seating is by general admission, on a first-come, first-served basis.

Liu Xiaobo receives Nobel Peace Prize

2010-10-08T07:50:00.003-04:00

Read the seven sentences that landed him in prison.

Watch Edward Albee, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, and others rally for Liu Xiaobo last New Year's Eve, reading those sentences, along with some of the poems he wrote while in a "reeducation camp."

Listen to Paul Auster read those poems.

Write to the Chinese government to demand his release.

Learn more here.

The Nobel and other news

2010-10-07T15:40:00.003-04:00

This morning, Mario Vargas Llosa, former president of PEN International, received the Nobel Prize for Literature. You can listen to his conversation with Salman Rushdie and Umberto Eco, which took place at PEN World Voices 2008, here.

Tomorrow, the Nobel committee will announce the recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. PEN is urging the committee to confer the award on Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned writer who would be the first citizen of China to receive the award. You can read all about PEN's campaign on his behalf here.

Next Wednesday, PEN will holds its annual awards ceremony. Anne Carson, Susan Choi, Don DeLillo, Paul Harding, Theresa Rebeck, and many others will be on hand to receive their awards, and the event is free, though seating is limited. If you would like to attend, RSVP to awards@pen.org.

The following Tuesday, October 19, PEN will present “State of Emergency: Censorship by Bullet in Mexico,” an event seeking to call attention to and discuss the silencing of Mexican journalists investigating drug violence in their country. Participants include Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Laura Esquivel, José Luis Martínez, Víctor Manuel Mendiola, Francine Prose, and Carmen Aristegui.

PEN round-up: Don DeLillo, World Voices, Mexican journalists, and more

2010-09-22T17:05:00.004-04:00

As we put the finishing touches on the fall issue, the PEN office is bustling.

Today, the 2010 PEN Literary Award winners were announced. Among them, Don DeLillo, who answered questions from PEN (via fax) on the occasion:

PEN: Thanks to e-books, blogs, and social media, writers are arguably using new technology as never before. Stories are written using Twitter, novels as text messages, and there seems to be a reemergence of serial narratives. Do you think technology will have a considerable influence on fiction? Do you think it already has?

DeLillo: The question is whether the enormous force of technology, and its insistence on speeding up time and compacting space, will reduce the human need for narrative—narrative in the traditional sense. Novels will become user-generated. An individual will not only tap a button that gives him a novel designed to his particular tastes, needs, and moods, but he’ll also be able to design his own novel, very possibly with him as main character. The world is becoming increasingly customized, altered to individual specifications. This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people speak, write, and read. Here’s a stray question (or a metaphysical leap): Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page? Does the beauty and variability of our language depend to an important degree on the medium that carries the words? Does poetry need paper?

To celebrate DeLillo’s award, our fall issue will include his 1983 short story “Human Moments in World War III,” the beginning of which you can read on PEN.org. For the rest, pre-order your copy of the issue (or subscribe!).

And, if you’re in New York, join us for the 2010 PEN Literary Awards ceremony on October 13.

News of this year’s winners followed just a day after PEN announced its new Director of the World Voices Festival and Public Programs, László Jakab Orsós, who joins PEN from the Hungarian Cultural Center. Jakab is also an accomplished journalist and screenwriter. You can read more about him here. The 2011 World Voices Festival will be held from April 25 to May 1.

Lastly, a trio of announcements from the Freedom to Write department: Liao Yiwu (discussed previously on the blog) has finally been permitted to travel outside China; PEN writers urged the U.N. to abandon efforts to legally prohibit the defamation of religion; and several writers from Mexico and the United States (including DeLillo) will gather next month to discuss and call attention to the violent suppression of journalists in America’s neighbor to the south. Please join us if you can.

PEN Quiz Night + the Brooklyn Book Festival

2010-09-08T10:56:00.009-04:00

It’s busy here as we finish the fall issue; details coming soon.

In the meantime, join me this Friday, at 7 pm, along with a great group of writers—Jami Attenberg, Jane Ciabattari, Lisa Dierbeck, Rivka Galchen, Tayari Jones, Joseph O’Neill, We sley Stace, and Justin Taylor—for the first PEN Quiz Night, at St. Ann’s Warehouse, on 38 Water Street in DUMBO in Brooklyn.

The quiz will start promptly at 8 pm, but you should arrive early for drinks and to be matched on an author’s team. That way you can compete both with and against some terrific writers. All the questions will be literary.

Quiz Night is PEN’s kickoff for the Brooklyn Book Festival, which takes place on Sunday. PEN will have a booth there, and has also put together a reading to mark the 50th Anniversary of PEN’s Freedom to Write program, which will include Cathy Park Hong, Roxana Robinson, Sarah Schulman, Xiaoda Xiao, and more.

Hope to see you there. (Pictured above: Joseph O’Neill, Rivka Galchen, Tayari Jones.)

“All these funny expressions” — Melissa James Gibson

2010-08-13T12:11:00.009-04:00

Starting with PEN America 8: Making Histories, each issue of PEN America has included at least one excerpt from a play. In the last few issues we’ve published dramatic work by Petr Zelenka, Sarah Ruhl, George Packer, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Nilo Cruz, and most recently, Melissa James Gibson.

I’m surprised more literary magazines don’t publish drama; while scripts are written to be performed, the best ones tend to work beautifully on the page as well. That’s certainly the case with This, the play by Melissa James Gibson that we excerpted in PEN America 12: Correspondences.

Gibson has a wonderful ear for the everyday absurdities of colloquial speech:

ALAN
All these funny expressions
Just Got The Baby Down
It’s like the baby’s depressed or
or like you’ve finally succeeded in oppressing the baby
I Just Got The Baby Down
I Just Got The Baby Down

This is from the opening scene; Alan is at the apartment of two college friends, Tom and Marrell, whose newborn baby never stays asleep for long. Another college friend, Jane, has joined them for a dinner party, along with Jean-Pierre, a French friend of Tom and Marrell’s.

MARRELL
Jean-Pierre’s a doctor
(with emphasis) Without Borders

ALAN
I always think that sounds like the doctor has a messy personal life

JEAN-PIERRE
That’s frequently the case actually

TOM
I’m a cabinet maker without borders

Tom and Marrell are trying to set Jean-Pierre up with Jane, a teacher and poet. When a surprisingly involved discussion of whether a “Brita” water filter should be pronounced with a short ‘i’ sound or a long ‘e’ sound (like “Rita”), Jean-Pierre turns to Jane as the expert on language:

JEAN-PIERRE
You’re the poet

JANE
More of a standardized test proctor these days actually
And I teach a bit

MARRELL
She’s being modest Don’t be modest

JANE
I’m an aMAZing standardized test proctor

The scene is full of funny, awkward, and tense exchanges, especially after the characters begin to play a parlor game—one that brilliantly highlights the way language can carry meanings other than the ones we intend. One person (Jane, as it hapens) must leave the room, while the others allegedly create a story in her absence. Then she must return to the room and piece the story together by asking a series of yes-or-no questions. But, as Tom and Marrell inform Alan and Jean-Pierre after Jane has left the room, the real game is that there is no story, and that Jane will construct one herself through her questions. I’ll simply say that this does not go well.

In Gibson’s work, as Charles Isherwood wrote in The New York Times, “even the drabbest constellations of vowels and consonants—words like ‘this,’ in other words—are made to soar and leap like ballet dancers in full, ecstatic flight, or alternately stand alone in a sea of silence, ominous and resonant, like those pregnant pauses in a Pinter play.”

You can read some of the excerpt we published at PEN.org; for the rest, pick up a copy of PEN America 12. And keep an eye out for Melissa James Gibson’s next play.

The underappreciated Sergei Dovlatov

2010-08-04T12:15:00.013-04:00

Like PEN America contributor Amitava Kumar, I knew nothing of Sergei Dovlatov (pictured right, with one-time Vice President of PEN Kurt Vonnegut, who has the lighter of the two mustaches) before I heard this New Yorker fiction podcast with David Bezmozgis (who has a novel excerpt in The New Yorker this week; he’s on their “20 under 40” list). I loved Bezmozgis’s story “Natasha,” published a few years ago in Harper’s, and so was particularly curious to hear what past New Yorker contributor he would choose to read and discuss with Deborah Treisman, the magazine’s fiction editor.

He did not disappoint. Dovlatov’s “The Colonel Says I Love You” is witty and wise; it demonstrates what Joseph Brodsky once said about Dovlatov (as I would later learn, thanks to Amitava): “The decisive thing is his tone, which every member of a democratic society can recognize: the individual who won’t let himself be cast in the role of a victim, who is not obsessed with what makes him different.” Dovlatov writes direct but surprising stories that draw heavily from his life; Bezmozgis aptly compares him to David Sedaris, though Dovlatov’s humor is less broad, and his circumstances—living and writing in communist Russia—give his stories a kind of moral weight, even if he handles it lightly.

So why isn’t he read more in the United States? Soon after the podcast, Sonya Chung pointed out on The Millions how hard it has become to get copies of his books in English, though they were all translated and published once upon a time (he died in 1990). “Why is Dovlatov so little known or read in the West today?" she asked, repeating a question Triesman had asked Bezmozgis. His answer: “I have no idea. It’s hard to understand these things.” As Chung notes, “Dovlatov couldn’t have said it better himself.” (Responding to Chung’s piece, the blogger languagehat, who reads Russian, said: “Dovlatov is one of the funniest and most likable writers I know, and I’m sure Americans would love him if he were properly introduced.”)

So when we were putting together PEN America 12, we decided we would re-publish one of Dovlatov’s stories. Happily, one of his translators, Antonina W. Bouis, is a generous member of PEN; I still have her copy of The Suitcase (though I’ll be returning it soon, promise!), from which we selected “A Poplin Shirt.”

When I was a child, my nanny, Luiza Genrikhovna, did everything distractedly. Once she dressed me in shorts and shoved both legs into one opening. I walked around like that all day. I was four. I knew that I had been dressed wrong, but I kept quiet. I didn’t want to change. I still don’t.

So the narrator tells us near the beginning of the story; he goes on to recount his first outing with his future wife (she speaks first in this bit):

“You can be trusted. I understood that immediately, as soon as I saw Solzhenitsyn’s portrait.”

“That’s Dostoyevsky. But I respect Solzhenitsyn, too.” We had a modest breakfast. Mother gave us a piece of halvah after all.

Then we went outside. The houses were decorated with bunting. Candy wrappers lay in the snow. Our janitor, Grisha, was showing off his ratiné coat.

....We went to the movies to see Ivan’s Childhood. The film was good enough for me to patronize. In that period I liked only detective movies, because they let me relax. But Tarkovsky’s movies I praised, patronizingly—and with a hint that Tarkovsky had been waiting for almost six years for a screenplay from me.

Near the end, the narrator reflects on the life he and his wife have lived:

Are we alike, then? I at least have a stimulus, a goal, an illusion, a hope. What does she have? Only our daughter, and indifference. We have twenty-five years of marriage behind us—twenty-five years of mutual isolation and indifference to real life. In those twenty-five years, our friends fell in love, married, and divorced. They wrote poems and novels about it all. They moved from one republic to another; they changed jobs, convictions, habits, became dissidents and alcoholics, tried to kill others or themselves. Marvelous, mysterious worlds arose and collapsed with a roar all around us. Like taut strings, human relations snapped. Our friends were reborn and died in the search for happiness.

And we? We faced all the temptations and horrors of life with our only gift—indifference. What is more solid than a castle built on sand? What is more durable and dependable in family life than mutual lack of character? What could be stabler than two hostile states each incapable of defending itself?

To read the rest, pick up PEN America 12: Correspondences, or try to find a copy of The Suitcase at your local used bookstore. And then maybe blog about it. Eventually someone will get the point and start publishing Dovlatov’s books in the U.S. again.

Billy Collins on poetry e-books (and in PEN America)

2010-07-21T17:43:00.010-04:00

The AP writer Hillel Italie published an interesting piece this week on poetry and e-books that was picked up by a number of outlets.

“Poetry,” Italie writes, “the most precise and precious of literary forms, is also so far the least adaptable to the growing e-book market. A three-line stanza might be expanded to four if a line is too long or a four-line stanza compressed into three if the second and fourth lines have sharp indentations, as with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hymn to the Night.”

Or as happened with some poems by Billy Collins when Collins took a look at his newest book on his Kindle. He found that, as he tells Italie, “if the original line is beyond a certain length, they will take the extra word and have it flush left on the screen, so that instead of a three-line stanza you actually have a four-line stanza. And that screws everything up.”

Collins goes on to say, rather poetically, that “prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into. Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break.”

Collins contributed two news poems to the latest issue of PEN America, “Horoscopes for the Dead,” parts I & II, and, as it happens, they begin with the experience of reading that great emblem of print, the newspaper—specifically, the horoscopes of a departed friend. I think I can reproduce their stanzas faithfully on this blog, so here’s how the first one begins:

Every morning since you fell down on the face of the earth,
I read about you in the newspaper
along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.

Sometimes I am reminded that today
will not be a wildly romantic time for you,
nor will you be challenged by educational goals
nor will you need to be circumspect at the workplace.

Another day, I learn that you will miss
an opportunity to travel and make new friends
though you never cared much about either.

I can’t imagine you ever facing a new problem
with a positive attitude, but you will definitely not
be doing that or anything like that on this weekday in March.
And the same goes for the fun
you might have gotten from group activities,
a likelihood attributed to everyone under your sign.

In the second, he puts the paper away:

I am better off closing the newspaper,
putting on the clothes I wore yesterday
(when I read that your financial prospects were looking up)
then pushing off on my copper-colored bicycle
and pedaling along the road by the shore of the bay.

To read the rest—along with poems by Paul Muldoon, Anne Carson, and many others—you’ll have to pick up a printed copy of PEN America.

Cuban journalist freed, Burmese poet speaks, Colombian journalist excluded

2010-07-12T15:55:00.014-04:00

Journalist Normando Hernández González (pictured right) was freed from prison in Cuba Saturday morning. He was arrested in 2003—one of 75 writers and activists jailed in a major crackdown on dissent—and sentenced to 25 years in prison for criticizing the government’s management of tourism, agriculture, fishing, and cultural affairs. His prison conditions were reportedly deplorable and he was hospitalized repeatedly over the past seven years.

As his health declined, PEN mounted an increasingly urgent campaign on his behalf, awarding him the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award in 2007 and pressing the Cuban government to provide adequate medical care and grant him a humanitarian release. He was finally released as part of an agreement between Cuban authorities and the Catholic Church to free 52 political prisoners, all jailed since the March 2003 crackdown. He will reportedly fly to Spain with his wife and daughter today.

Meanwhile, Saw Wei, whose subversively acrostic poem “February the Fourteenth” we published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, has given an interview to the The Irrawaddy, a magazine that covers Burma and other parts of southeast Asia (it's named for a river in Burma; credit to The Literary Saloon for spotting the interview). As previously noted, Saw Wei was jailed for disturbing public tranquility with a poem; happily, he did more writing while in prison:

I wrote some poems and essays while I was in prison. I have to make some final revisions to an essay called “Modern Art and Modern Images.” Before I was put in jail, I had already written about 50 short stories and planned to publish the stories in one go. But I couldn’t finish that, because I was imprisoned.

For the community work, we have a group called “White Rainbow.” We need more members. I want to go everywhere to help our people. If there are no restrictions, I will continue this work.

Meanwhile, a Colombian journalist, Hollman Morris, who was recently selected to participate in the Nieman fellowship program at Harvard, has been denied a visa by the United States. “We were very surprised. This has never happened before,” the Nieman curator, Bob Giles, is quoted as saying in an AP story about the case. PEN, the ACLU, and the American Association of University Professors have sent a letter to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton protesting Morris’s exclusion.

On a lighter note, if you’re having a hard time letting go of the World Cup, here’s a possible antidote: 32 books to add to your reading list, one from each finalist nation—courtesy of And erson Tepper. For Brazil, he selects Clarice Lispector, and suggests you join in the discussion of her final work, The Hour of the Star (New Directions), at PEN.org/penreads. That discussion has been quite interesting so far; “Clarice is not mysterious or (worse) obscure,” writes one participant in the conversation, who seems familiar with her work in Portguese, “she is intense.”

Update: The AP has the first photographs (taken by Arturo Rodriguez) of Hernández landing in Madrid.

PEN Reads starts today + other links

2010-07-06T11:54:00.005-04:00

PEN Reads has begun with this short essay by Colm Tóibín. Check it out and weigh in with your own thoughts. And if you haven’t already, get a copy of The Hour of the Star and stay tuned to PEN.org/PENReads for more in the weeks ahead. (It’s a short book so you needn’t worry too much about falling behind—or resort to watching the movie... though apparently it’s pretty good?)

The Rumpus also has a book club and until Friday they’re giving away free books.

Also via The Rumpus: Etgar Keret (beloved contributor to PEN America) describes for the online magazine Tablet his practice of writing fake dedications. When “a total stranger” asks you to sign a book, he says, what can you write that doesn't sound smarmy or false? Which leads him to this conclusion: “If the books themselves are pure fiction, why should the dedications be true?” One book he inscribes: “To Avram. I don’t care what the lab tests show. For me, you’ll always be my dad.” And in another, which someone has asked him to sign for his girlfriend, Keret writes: “Bosmat, though you’re with another guy now, we both know you’ll come back to me in the end.”

Keret’s countryman and fellow short-short story writer Alex Epstein has just published in the United States a collection of his really wonderful stories (translated by Becka Mara McKay)—ten of which were featured in PEN America 12: Correspondences. Words Without Borders has both a review of the book and a video interview with Epstein. He participated in the PEN World Voices Festival this year, so you can also watch him converse with Norman Rush, Claire Messud, et al; listen to him discuss the short story with Aleksandar Hemon, Yiyun Li, and others; and hear him participate in the PEN Translation Slam.

And you can read the stories we published in PEN America 12: Correspondences. Here’s the shortest one:

THE MELANCHOLY OF ANTIQUE TELEPHONES

In ’83, the horoscopes are never wrong. After ten years, she moves the rotary telephone from the living room into the bedroom. Every morning, upon waking, she lifts the receiver and listens to whispering and rustling and rattling, as at a window. Maybe this is time, suddenly returning. Maybe this is rain. Maybe this is already her mother tongue.

Read the others here.

New online reading group: PEN Reads

2010-06-25T13:50:00.008-04:00

This week PEN American Center announced the creation of PEN Reads, an online reading group that will focus on books connected in some way with PEN’s mission—to protect free expression and promote international literary fellowship. The discussion will be built around short essays by writers, translators, scholars, and others, and participation will be open to anyone.

The short essays will be posted at www.PEN.org/PENReads, and readers will be able to comment on each post, participating in a conversation with the discussion’s contributors and with each other.

The first book chosen for PEN Reads is The Hour of the Star, a short, classic novel by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, who lived from 1920 to 1977 (that’s her above, in Paris in 1947; photograph by Bluma Wainer). The book was translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero. Here, in English, is how it begins:

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.

You can read more here. And you can read an excerpt from Benjamin Moser’s biography of Spector (the NBCC Award-nominated Why This World) here.

Moser will be participating in the online discussion, which will be kicked off Tuesday, July 6 at noon with a contribution from the great Irish novelist Colm Tóibín.

Correspondences elsewhere

2010-06-15T12:03:00.018-04:00

Our spring issue, Correspondences, has received some kind attention from some great websites—and one of its stories, or part of that story, has taken on a new and fantastic form online.

The blog Like Fire at Open Letters Monthly calls attention to the very smart and very funny short essay by Anya Ulinich (whose very smart and very funny story “The Nurse and the Novelist” was published in PEN America 9). That essay is part of the Correspondences forum, which you can still contribute to yourself.

Also part of that forum: Sam Lipsyte’s letter to Barry Hannah, mentioned here previously and praised by the blog of American Short Fiction, along with the rest of the issue.

The email exchange between Jonathan Lethem and David Gates, also mentioned here before, was highlighted by the Book Bench blog run by The New Yorker and was called “absolutely wonderful” by The Rumpus.

(Update: GQ spotlighted the Lethem/Gates exchange as well.)

Finally, part of the story in the issue by Lily Hoang, “Sonata for a Ragdoll Without Eyes,” which is not available online—and which, appropriately for our Correspondences issue, is based on a letter Lily found—has been beautifully adapted for the web here, here, and here by W5RAn. (That’s the opening to the story above.)

The poem that threatened “public tranquility”

2010-05-27T10:31:00.006-04:00

Saw Wei, pictured left, whose “only ‘crime’ was writing a poem,” has been released from prison in Burma, “nearly five months after his sentence expired and two and a half years after he was sent to prison for ‘inducing crime against public tranquility’.”

How did Saw Wei, according to the government in Myanmar, threaten public tranquility? He wrote “February the Fourteenth,” an eight-line poem about Valentine’s Day, which was published in Love Journal, a weekly magazine based in Rangoon. We published an anonymous English translation in PEN America 10: Fear Itself (the translation was later reprinted in Harper’s):

Arensberg said:
Only once you have experienced deep pain
And madness
And like an adolescent
Thought the blurred photo of a model
Great art
Can you call it heartbreak.
Millions of people
Who know how to love
Please clap your gilded hands
And laugh out loud.

“February the Fourteenth” is an acrostic poem: When the first letters of each line are put together in Burmese, they read “General Than Shwe is crazy with power.” Than Shwe is Myanmar's 77-year-old military dictator. The issue of Love Journal in which “February the Fourteenth” was published sold out quickly after word of the coded message spread.

PEN continues to work with the Open Society Institute to pressure the government in Myanmar to follow the rule of law and release the “many other writers, journalists, and bloggers still imprisoned in that country today, including Nay Phone Latt,” who received the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award this year. Learn more about (and get involved in) the campaign here and here.

Alain de Botton, Thomas Beller, and Rick Moody reflect on Twitter

2010-05-21T14:14:00.026-04:00

Over at Guernica, Joel Whitney says that “Alain de Botton has humanized the mechanical beast that is Twitter.” As de Botton himself writes in PEN America 12: Correspondences, that is precisely the goal:

The moral, as always, is that we have to find ways of making technology work for us... the best inventions tend to have flexibility built into them, they should be able to accommodate a whole range of responses—not least, some idle philosophical maxims.

Joel has selected a few of his favorites maxims from de Botton’s Twitter feed, such as: “Modern romanticism: we go in search of one person who will spare us any need for other people.” You can read de Botton’s reflections on Twitter in our forum.

There you’ll also find Thomas Beller’s thoughts on the platform. Twitter, Beller says, has allowed him “inside a poetic process that was previously unknown to me.” Before, he explains, poetry “had a slightly medicinal quality to it... a faint aftertaste of self-improvement.” But the 140-character boxes of Twitter force you “into a realm of brevity,” and even “insist on a kind of cadence.” So he has found himself writing little numbered riffs (I call them postcards)... Sometimes,” he adds, “I’ll even go nuts and rhyme.”

The “postcard” Beller shared for our forum recounts the time his band opened for Blur in 1992. It ends with him signing a girl’s jeans, then seeing her father in a minivan waiting to her and her friends home. This gives Beller, in the present, pause:

9 Now I’m a dad, too, with a little girl who rushes to strange men to grab their leg, and smile. I think, Oh God. What are you going to do?

10 That is a memory from the Marquee, 1992.

Rick Moody also reflects in the new issue on the formal constraints of Twitter. As was widely discussed at the time, Moody published a short story on Twitter, and in a short essay (written in 140-character segments), he explains, first, his motivations:

there is something about the character-counting box that I find really thrilling, really exciting. So I got this idea that I should
attempt to write something, a narrative something, within the confines of the permitted 140 characters of Twitter. A postmodern haiku cycle..

He goes on to describe the publicity that was generated before the story began to appear, and the frustrations people expressed afterward.

Before the story was “published,” which is to say before it was “tweeted,” it got attention for its chutzpah. Still, no one had yet
read it. It existed in a publicity-oriented space, which I don’t think is a literary space, exactly. Forty thousand read it on Twitter,
more than have read most of my books. And I suppose that is good. But then there was a significant backlash, owing to “retweets.”

He concludes with a personal lesson he’s taken from the experience:

I love experiment. I love challenges. I love language as it mutates. But I also think that books are the most stable home for what we do.

And so fittingly, perhaps, the print copy of our new issue, perfect-bound like a paperback, is the only place where you can read the rest of his reflections. And if you’d like to read the story he tweeted, “Some Contemporary Characters,” on printed pages or otherwise, check out Electric Literature.

(By the way, we’ve re-booted our now annual subscription offer celebrating the publication of a new PEN/O. Henry Prize anthology, which this year features stories by Alice Munro, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Annie Proulx, William Trevor, and many more. Get the collection free with a subscription to PEN America, while supplies last.)

Guest Post: Ben Greenman on writing letters to fictional characters

2010-05-18T11:11:00.006-04:00

One of the options in our latest forum is to write a letter to a fictional character (you can read Pico Iyer’s letter to Thomas Fowler, from The Quiet American, here). The writer Ben Greenman, who published a book called Correspondences in 2008, had a similar idea: In connection with an expanded version of that book called What He’s Poised to Do, he launched the blog Letters With Character; we asked him to write about it here.

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Correspondences. It was published by Hotel St. George, a visionary small press in Brooklyn, and it was more a box than a book—a banded, folded assemblage that contained three small pamphlets, each with two short stories. The stories all dealt directly or indirectly with the art of letter-writing, and how it both aided and impeded human communication.

There was a seventh story printed directly on the outside of the box, and it was intentionally uncompleted: I left lacunae in the story in the form of unwritten postcards sent between the main characters, and I invited readers to imagine them and send them to me. The Postcard Project wasn’t entirely new, of course: it was a mix of Mad Libs and Choose Your Own Adventure and crowdsourcing. But the postcards that came in had a strange energy: people took up arms against one character, or strove to create sympathy for another, or hijacked the narrative entirely.

Early last year, Correspondences migrated over to Harper Perennial and evolved into a longer collection called What He’s Poised to Do, named for the intentionally uncompleted story. My editors and I briefly debated reviving the Postcard Project, but decided instead to come at the question of letters and readers and fiction, and how they collide and collude, from an entirely different direction. The result was Letters With Character, a blog that invites readers to write letters to fictional characters. We launched the site at the beginning of May, and the letters trickled, and then poured in. Within ten days we had more than a hundred submissions: letters to Austerlitz and Tyler Durden, to Karen and Amir, to Charly and Brett and even Blue Coat. A few authors (Conan Doyle, Melville, Murakami) surfaced frequently, and certain genres (fantasy and particularly vampire fiction) were disproportionately represented.

But this is just demographic data, and the sample size is fairly small. What is more apparent is that almost from the first, readers perceived the site’s purpose in vastly different ways. A significant minority of the submissions were simple letters of devotion to characters, fan mail thanking Harry Potter for inspiring children to read, or congratulating Holden Caulfield for holding his own against a tide of hypocrisy, or praising Jane Eyre for just being herself. They could not all be published, in part because there were too many of them and in part because they were not, in the end, particularly interesting. They stayed outside the work, interacted with it only insofar as they pointed and smiled. Others were quick hits, brief missives criticizing a character’s choices, and usually romantic choices. This seemed like a valid approach—all of us have been busybodies when we read—but it was not always the most rewarding one.

The meatier letters approached reading not as a passive experience, but as an active one—and, moreover, as an equivocal one. They admitted that the best characters are difficult to locate too precisely: attractive characters, because they are ultimately unavailable to us, can cause us to feel a longing that verges on repulsion; and inoffensive characters, precisely as a result of their ingratiating nature, can inspire surprising upjuts of aggression. These better letters recognized that literature always touches us in many places at once, and they used the conventions of the epistolary form (address, signoff, highly personal voice) to control this welter of emotions.

Often, this led to comedy. A letter to A.A. Milne’s Winnie-The-Pooh demonstrates an almost sadistic curiosity regarding the puffy little bear’s dressing habits (“I noticed that you’re wearing a shirt, not just into the pool anymore but all the time. You’ve changed. Are you embarrassed or something?”), and a short, sharp letter to Jay Gatsby chides him for his indiscriminate carousing (“Can I make a suggestion? Cancel the band. Turn off your lights. Lock your doors, for once”).

Not every submission resorted to humor. There is a pained, naïve challenge to Mearsault. There is a melancholy commiseration with Magnus Derrick. There is a lovely romantic overture, of a sort, to Eva, the doomed heroine of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story “Eva Is Inside Her Cat.” There’s a brief statement of brotherhood to Xuanzang, from the sixteenth-century Chinese epic Monkey. And there is a wonderfully desperate appeal to Nicholas Payne, from Tom McGuane’s The Bushwhacked Piano (one of my favorite books, and one I was inspired to reread as a result of the letter). As the site grows—since I started writing this post, we’ve received letters to Jesus, to Werther, to Ma Joad, to Dracula, to Seymour Glass, and to Dare Wright’s Lonely Doll—the individual cases begin to feed a larger consideration of the psychological process at work. What does it mean to address a fictional character directly, and to consider him or her independently of the author? Are people more honest writing when they write letters to fictional characters? Are these letters diaristic at one remove? Do the letters adopt the style of the work they’re writing to, or adopt a contrary style to establish independence? The project continues, so the answers to these questions will, I hope, come into sharper focus.

Ben Greenman is an editor at The New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books of fiction, including Superbad, Please Step Back, and the forthcoming What He’s Poised to Do. He lives in Brooklyn.

“Why in God’s name would I be on Facebook?”—Jonathan Lethem & David Gates on writing right now

2010-05-12T11:58:00.015-04:00

For our new issue about writing as a form of correspondence, we asked several writers to exchange emails about being a writer at the present moment, about the public and the private aspects of the writing life, and, well, whatever else interested them.

Some of the correspondents—Claire Messud and Mohammed Naseehu Ali, for example—had never met, while others had known each other for years. In this latter category are Jonathan Lethem and David Gates, whose long friendship led to a frank and funny exchange that includes the line above. After Lethem asked Gates why he wasn’t on Facebook , Gates replied thusly, then quoted, with tongue no doubt in cheek, a famous exchange attributed to two earlier American writers:

“Henry, what are you doing in there?”
“Waldo, what are you doing out there?”

(This is supposedly what Ralph Waldo Emerson said to Thoreau during the latter’s prison stay chronicled in “On Civil Disobedience,” followed by Thoreau’s reported reply.)

The whole exchange between Lethem and Gates is a smart, searching, and witty back-and-forth about their experiences as writers, teachers—and readers. In Gates’s first email (just posted at PEN.org; more of the emails will appear throughout the week), he brings up David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, excerpted in PEN America 11: Make Believe and much discussed (you can even watch Shields talk about the book with Stephen Colbert):

It’s helped clarify for me why I can read so little fiction these days, and why I can’t stand most of what I’m now writing myself. It doesn’t, however, explain to me why fiction works for me when it works for me—not that this is an explanation I need.

Stay tuned for Lethem’s reply—or get the whole exchange now by ordering the issue.

Sam Lipsyte writes a letter to Barry Hannah

2010-05-06T16:38:00.008-04:00

Our new issue, Correspondences, tries to examine the ways all literature is a form of correspondence—letters from writers to readers, from writers to the world. It features a work of fiction by Lily Hoang based on a letter she found; an excerpt from Anne Carson’s new “book in a box,” made in part of old letters from her late brother; and Rick Moody’s reflections on “tweeting” a story (he reflects in 140-character segments, of course).

It also features a forum in which writers either compose a short letter to another writer (or a fictional character) or tell a story about their experience with one of the new technologies of correspondence (email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

We’ve begun posting some of their pieces on PEN.org, and the latest to go up is a letter from Sam Lipsyte to Barry Hannah:

I was a Jewish kid from New Jersey. My literary heroes were meant to be Roth and Bellow and maybe Updike, for ethnic variety. Their accomplishments rightly endure. But your books burned me down. You sang, you startled, you dreamed, you mourned and exulted and laughed with new sounds, new sentences. Perhaps they bore the magic of the languages your character Ned Maximus (“thirty-eight and somewhat Spanish”) speaks: “white, Negro, some Elizabethan, some Apache.” And no matter how reckless your leaps, your sentences and your paragraphs, like tiny genius gymnasts, stuck every landing.

Read the whole thing. And write your own letter while you’re there. Oh, and buy the issue, too.

(The image above is a Barry Hannah manuscript, found here.)

Pushcart Prize for Hari Kunzru’s fiction from PEN America 10

2010-05-04T15:26:00.004-04:00

“At the beginning of the Decadence it was easy. Although we were bored, and though everything had been done before, we were seized with a peculiar sense of potential. Our anomie had something optimistic to it. This was the golden age of our decline.”

So begins “Memories of the Decadence,” an older story by Hari Kunzru that we published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself. Today we were alerted that Hari has won a Pushcart Prize for the piece, which will be included in the next Pushcart Prize anthology, to be published in November. Hari’s short fiction has been collected in the UK, but not in the United States—yet. Perhaps someone will decide to rectify that.

This is the second year in a row that a work of fiction from PEN America has been selected for the Pushcart anthology; last year, Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s “Soap and Ambergis,” from PEN America 9: Checkpoints, was tapped for the honor.

So, congratulations to Hari. And more about our new issue, and the just completed World Voices Festival, soon.

PEN America 12: Correspondences

2010-04-27T15:23:00.013-04:00

Copies of our new issue just arrived in the PEN office. I’ll have much more to say about what’s between the covers after World Voices is over, but for now, a brief preview (by the way, you can order your own copy here—or, better yet, subscribe):

First, I want to mention pieces by 2010 World Voices participants—including fiction by Alex Epstein (translated by Becka Mara McKay), travelogue by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by John Lambert, whose thoughts on translating Toussaint can be read at The Elegant Variation), and an email exchange between Claire Messud and Mohammed Naseehu Ali which is being posted in installments this week at PEN.org.

I also want to mention the beautiful excerpt from Zeina Abirached’s Mourir partir revenir: Le jeu des hirondelles (To Die, to Leave, to Return: A Game for Swallows), translated by Edward Gauvin. This is one of two comics from the issue, one from Lebanon, the other from Iran; I'll have more to say about the other comic soon.

Lastly, I want to point your attention to the forum. For this issue, we asked writers to respond to one of two prompts:

1 Write the first paragraph of a letter you’d like to send either to another writer, living or dead, or to a fictional character.

or

2 Describe your experience with the new technology of correspondence: Twitter, e-mail, Facebook, etc.

We got replies from Siri Hustvedt, Sam Lipsyte, Terry Castle, Pico Iyer, and many others. We’ll be posting those responses online over the next couple weeks. In the meantime, we’d love to get your your own replies.

More soon. In the meantime, don’t miss “Literary Magazines: Here and Abroad, Now and in the Future,” tomorrow at 7 pm at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, and featuring M Mark, John Freeman of Granta, Rob Spillman of Tin House, Swiss writer Peter Stamm, and Argentinean writer Rodrigo Fresán. Hope to see you there.

Weekend reading, pre-festival edition

2010-04-22T15:27:00.011-04:00

PEN.org and Words Without Borders have made several works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by World Voices authors available online. So start reading now; then, next week, you can introduce yourself to the authors whose work you especially loved.

Read fiction and essays by Sofi Oksanen, Atiq Rahimi, Andrzej Stasiuk, and Miguel Syjuco before going to “Readings from around the Globe” (Wednesday, 8 pm, 92nd Street Y) which also features Mohsin Hamid, Yiyun Li, Salman Rushdie, Patti Smith, and others.

Before Thursday’s conversation about Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Elizabeth Hardwick (“New York Stories,” 7 pm, Morgan Library), you’ll want to read an excerpt from Quim Monzó’s book, Gasoline, which is set in New York; Monzo is participating in the conversation along with Darryl Pinckney, Roxana Robinson, Colm Tóibín, and Edwin Frank. (You might also check out Robinson’s short story “The Trade” in PEN America 11: Make Believe.)

If you choose instead to attend Eshkol Nevo’s conversation with Michael Orthofer (also Thursday at 7 pm, Center for Jewish History) read an excerpt from Nevo’s Homesick. Or, if you’re headed to “Weather Report,” Thursday’s conversation about global warming (8 pm at the Metropolitan Museum), you can read pieces on the subject by participants James Hansen and Bill McKibben.

Finally, before you go to Saturday’s conversation about war, read Deborah Amos on “The Eclipse of the Sunnis.”

Lethem & Smith, Monzó & Coover, Ford & Hazzard & more: conversations @ PEN World Voices

2010-04-19T13:21:00.009-04:00

As I’ve mentioned before, one-one-one conversations are among my favorite World Voices events. This year, several of the pairings seem especially felicitous.

On Thursday (7 pm, Center for Jewish History), Michael Orthofer of The Complete Review (and its Literary Saloon) will talk to Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo about home, living under threat, and the art of breaking up. (Orthofer knows international literature as well as anyone, so I’d love to make this one—but I'll be elsewhere.)

On Friday (3:30, Deutsches Haus), Robert Coover will talk with Quim Monzó about the latter’s new book, Gasoline, out soon from Open Letter. Monzó has been compared as a writer to Coover, whose influence he has acknowledged—and whose work he has translated—so that should make for an interesting discussion.

Similarly, Richard Ford has expressed his admiration for the work of Shirley Hazzard (whose novel The Bay of Noon was just shortlisted for the Booker Prize for... 1970), with whom he’ll talk on Friday night (7 pm, 92nd Street Y). The evening will feature readings of Hazzard’s work by friends and admirers, including Annabel Davis-Goff and others.

The following afternon, Jonathan Lethem talks with Patti Smith (1 pm, Cooper Union). If you’ve read Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist, then you know this should be good—and apparently Smith and Lethem are both big Bolaño fans.

Later that day, Philippine-born writer and Miguel Syjuco will talk with his former teacher, Nicholas Jose, now the director of Australian Studies at Harvard. Syjuco won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize for Illustrado, which will be published in the U.S. next week.

And on Sunday I’m going to talk with Rawi Hage (3 pm, FIAF), whose excellent book Cockroach was excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

If you can’t make it to the events themselves, audio (and, in some cases, video) will go up within a week or so after they take place. So stay tuned.

Literary magazines here and abroad, now and in the future...

2010-04-15T16:13:00.009-04:00

In the latest “little review”—“a weekly look at the world of little magazines”—Christopher Glazek mentions the “Magazines of the Americas” project recently launched by n + 1. Beginning with the new issue, n + 1 hopes to include in each issue a translated work from another magazine published in the Americas; upcoming issues will feature work from writers in Peru and Columbia. You can learn more about the project here.

Meanwhile, the editors of The Massachusetts Review have declared their intentions to begin the magazine’s “second half century by dramatically increasing the amount we publish in translation,” as noted by Scott Esposito over at Two Words. (They’ve even hired a translation editor.) “Our government has been broadcasting The Voice of America for well over fifty years,” Jim Hicks writes (PDF), “it’s high time that the country opened its ears as well as its mouth.”

That’s exactly the spirit behind “Literary Magazines: Here and Abroad, Now and in the Future,” an event PEN America is sponsoring along with Galapagos Art Space (where the event will be held), during the upcoming World Voices Festival. M Mark, the editor of PEN America, will be joined by the editors of Granta and Tin House—John Freeman and Rob Spillman, respectively—as well as by Peter Stamm, a Swiss writer and an editor of the literary quarterly Entwürfe für Literatur, and Rodrigo Fresán, the Argentinian writer who lives in Spain and has contributed to Granta, PEN America, and other “little magazines.”

We’ll talk about how the role of the literary magazine is changing in the internet age, how it varies across continents, and more. We’ll also launch issue #12 of PEN America (about which more soon), and celebrate the new issues of Granta (devoted to sex) and Tin House (focused on games). Both those magazines, of course, have long championed writing from all over the world, and I’ve already trumpeted recent recognition for PEN America’s “international coverage.”

Galapagos Art Space is a great venue with a good bar, and the event is free. Hope to see you there.

When: Thursday, April 29
Where: Galapagos Art Space, DUMBO, 16 Main Street, Brooklyn
What time: 7–8:30 p.m.

Free and open to the public. No reservations.

Festival highlight: the climate crisis and how to deal with it

2010-04-13T11:27:00.004-04:00

One of the liveliest events at last year’s World Voices Festival was “The Economic Crisis and How to Deal with It,” a panel discussion co-sponsored by The New York Review of Books that included Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, and Robin Wells. Labeled “The Neo-Keynsian Smackdown” by Garth Risk Hallberg, the event featured heated debate before a passionate audience and prompted many responses. (You can watch the event here, listen to it here, and read excerpts of the conversation here.)

This year, Robert Silvers of The NYRB has again put together a panel of heavyweights to wrestle with a massively important subject. At “Weather Report: What Can We Do?”, Jostein Gaarder, James Hansen, Frederic Hauge, Bjørn Lomborg, Bill McKibben, Andrew Revkin, and Cynthia Rosenzweig will discuss how and whether we can beat back the encroaching danger of global warming. As with last year's economic panel, the participants represent a wide spectrum of educated views; Lomborg, for instance, is the author of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, while Bill McKibben’s books include The End of Nature and Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

It should be another interesting and animated discussion. Full details are below; tickets are available here.

Weather Report: What Can We Do?

When: Thursday, April 29

Where: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, 83rd Street and Fifth Avenue, New York City

What time: 8–9:30 p.m.

Tickets: $25/$20 PEN Members/The Metropolitan Museum of Art Members and New York Review of Books subscribers; www.smarttix.com or (212) 868-4444. For Member discount code, please contact Lara Tobin at lara@pen.org or (212) 334-1660 ext. 126.

Tonight: Tariq Ramadan in NYC and online

2010-04-08T11:12:00.004-04:00

Tariq Ramadan arrived in the United States yesterday, his first visit since 2004, when the Bush administration revoked his visa using a provision from the Patriot Act. When he arrived at Newark International Report, there remained “one last hurdle,” according to The New York Times: “a closed-door session with three immigration agents, one after the other, who asked him where he planned to go, whom he planned to meet and what he planned to discuss.”

Tonight at 7 p.m. he’ll discuss secularism, Islam, and democracy with Dalia Mogahed, George Packer, Joan Wallach Scott, and Jacob Weisberg at Cooper Union in New York. Tickets are no longer on sale online, but there may be some available at the door. For those who can’t make it or can’t get in, the event will be shown online here.

Festival highlights: New European Fiction & War

2010-03-29T17:43:00.008-04:00

This year, there will be two World Voices events at Le Poisson Rouge, where PEN America had its own launch party back in October. It’s a fun space, right in the middle of Greenwich Village, and both these events look terrific.

The first—which will take place at noon on Saturday, May 1—is centered on Best European Fiction, an anthology published by Dalkey Archive that got a lot of attention earlier in the year. The event also reunites Aleksandar Hemon (who edited the anthology) and Colum McCann (who will write the preface to next year’s Best European Fiction), two PEN America favorites whose conversation in The Believer I highlighted a few weeks back.

As I understand it, the event will start with a conversation between Colum and Sasha about the state of fiction in Europe. Then three contributors to the anthology (Naja Marie Aidt, valter hugo mãe, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint) will read from their work before talking with Hemon about fiction in their respective countries (those would be Denmark, Portugal, and Belgium).

“War” will bring together Deborah Amos, Philip Gourevitch, Arnon Grunberg, Sebastian Junger, and Daniele Mastrogiacomo. Amos covers Iraq for NPR; Gourevitch has written about war in Rwanda, Iraq, and elsewhere; Grunberg is a novelist who has visited Iraq several times in the last few years; Junger’s war reporting has been collected in a new book simply titled War, which will be published in May; and Mastrogiacomo is an Italian journalist who, in 2007, was kidnapped along with the journalist Ajmal Naqshbandi and a driver, Sayed Agha, while covering the war in Afghanistan.

These five writers will discuss the difficulties and the responsibilities entailed in reporting on wars around the world.

Utne Independent Press Award nomination (and the “Top Quark”)

2010-03-23T13:14:00.007-04:00

Two pieces of happy news to share. First, PEN America has received its first Utne Independent Press Award nomination, in the category of international coverage. We face stiff competition from last year’s winner The New Statesman, plus The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Middle East Report, NACLA Report on the Americas, The New Internationalist, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, and The Walrus. It’s great to be in their company.

Second, Tomasz Rozycki’s guest post about “Scorched Maps,” a poem of his published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, was selected by Robert Pinsky for the “Top Quark,” celebrating the year's best blog writing in arts & literature. Here’s what Pinsky said about Rozycki’s piece:

Tomasz Rozycki’s poem “Scorched Maps”—translated by Mira Rosenthal into real lines of poetry in English: I will remember this poem about memory and Rozycki's commentary (same translator) on it. The image of the past and its losses as “subterranean” is familiar. Re-imagined in “Scorched Maps,” the image regains its emotional force: the seeker face-down and speaking to the earth, and the earth along with the lives it contains responding, “vast and wild around my head.”

PEN America contributor Amitava Kumar received second prize for his short-short story “Postmortem,” which, Pinsky said, “has also entered my imagination in a way I will not forget. ” And Lydia Kiesling received third prize for her review of Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, a review published by The Millions. Congratulations to Lydia, Amitava, Mira, and Tomasz.

Festival highlight: Opening Night

2010-03-22T13:21:00.005-04:00

Most World Voices events are free, but a few do cost money and require tickets—which often sell out.

Among these is the opening night reading, which this year features a particularly eclectic group of readers, from Salman Rushdie to Patti Smith—plus Mohsin Hamid, László Krasznahorkai, Andrea Levy, Yiyun Li, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, Soﬁ Oksanen, Atiq Rahimi, Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, Andrzej Stasiuk, and Miguel Syjuco.

In keeping with the last couple of World Voices Festivals, each of these readers will read in his or her own language, with the English text of the reading scrolling on a giant screen behind them. You can hear the poetry of the original—and still know what the readers are talking about (and appreciate the work of their translators, too).

This year, the “Opening Night Extravaganza” will be held in the beautiful reading space at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center.

Readings from Around the Globe: Opening Night Extravaganza

When: Wednesday, April 28

Where: 92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center, 1395 Lexington Avenue, New York City

What time: 8–9:30 p.m.

Tickets: $20/$15 PEN Members and Poetry Center subscribers; www.smarttix.com or (212) 868-4444. For Member discount code, please contact Lara Tobin at lara@pen.org or (212) 334-1660 ext. 126.

Co-sponsored by 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center

Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison, Richard Price, Patti Smith, Salman Rushdie, Roddy Doyle, Melvin Van Peebles...

2010-03-19T13:36:00.005-04:00

...as you may have heard, those are just a few of the participants in this year’s PEN World Voices Festival. My favorite reply to the newly unveiled lineup comes from Mark Sarvas: “the organizers appear to have outdone themselves,” he says, adding, “it’s enough to tempt me into thinking about a trip east to cover this one for all my loyal readers.” I hope we see him soon.

Much more in this space over the next few weeks, of course; in the meantime, a few notes before the weekend:

* As noted earlier this week in The New York Times, PEN and the ACLU are teaming up with Slate to sponsor a conversation with Tariq Ramadan and others, held at Cooper Union in New York on April 8. This will be the first U.S. appearance for Ramadan since he was barred from entering the country by the Bush administration.

* Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s novel Munira’s Bottle was written up recently in Arab News (via The Literary Saloon). The novel was excerpted in PEN America 9, earning the magazine its first Pushcart Prize. Here’s what Annie Proulx has to say about the book:

Munira’s Bottle is a rich and skillfully crafted story of a dysfunctional Saudi Arabian family. One of its strengths lies in its edgy characters: Munira, a sultry, self-centered, sexually repressed woman; Ibn Al-Dahhal, the bold imposter who deceives and betrays her; and Muhammad, her perpetually angry and righteous brother, a catalyst who forces the events. Western readers will welcome it for its opening door into Arab lives and minds.

(You can read a conversation about “Books that Changed My Life” featuring both Proulx and Al-Mohaimeed in PEN America 10.)

* Tomorrow we’ll find out how much Robert Pinsky liked Tomasz Rozycki’s piece about “Scorched Maps,” a finalist for The Quark. Among the other finalists is PEN America contributor Amitava Kumar.

* There’s no online announcement yet, but PEN America has received its first Utne Independent Press Award nomination, in the category of international coverage. More on that soon.

Links: Kiarostami on Panahi, Cole on Yoo, and more reality hunger

2010-03-10T14:08:00.010-05:00

Check out the great new feature on literature in translation up at PEN.org—including the latest online “translation slam.”

Abbas Kiarostami, probably Iran’s most esteemed living filmmaker (his films include Taste of Cherry, among many others), has written a letter calling “for the release of Jafar Panahi and Mahmoud Rasoulof, two directors recently detained by the authorities” in Iran. (PEN is currently lobbying for free expression in Iran along with five other organizations; learn more here.)

Kiarostami sent the Persian-language text of his letter and an English translation to a New York Times blog, The Lede, through Hooman Majd, author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (and a contributor to PEN America 10: Fear Itself). You can read it here.

David Cole has written a long post about John Yoo and the torture memos for the excellent blog of The New York Review of Books. Cole, a professor of constitutional law, has been covering this story in detail for some time (he also participated in both the New York and Washington, D.C. versions of “Reckoning with Torture”) and will have a longer version of this piece in The NYRB’s next issue.

Progress has been made in the fight for reader privacy, despite some recent setbacks.

David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, excerpted in PEN America 11: Make Believe, continues to provoke reflections on writing, reality, fiction and more; this week, James Wood responds to the book in The New Yorker.

Tomasz Rozycki’s guest post here on the blog is now a finalist for “The Quark,” a prize for the best blog writing of the year. The winner will be decided by Robert Pinsky.

Livestream of tonight's event + other links

2010-03-03T17:38:00.006-05:00

If you can’t make it to tonight’s event, “Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the ‘War on Terror’,” in Washington, D.C., you can watch it live here at 7 p.m.

The Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, “whose work has consistently challenged the country’s social strictures, especially as they pertain to women,” was reportedly arrested along with his wife, his daughter, and 15 dinner guests, at his home on Monday night. (Via. Read about PEN’s Iran campaign, “Our Society Will Be a Free Society,” here.)

Sam Lipsyte’s new book The Ask is getting great reviews all around; you can listen to him read from the hilarious Home Land over at PEN.org.

Lastly, the excellent blog 3 Quarks Daily is awarding their annual prizes for “the best blog writing in the areas of science, philosophy, politics, and arts & literature.” Tomasz Rozycki’s guest post about his poem “Scorched Maps” is a nominee in the latter category; you can vote for it here (but only once!). The finalists will be judged by the American poet Robert Pinsky.

Liao Yiwu detained in China

2010-03-02T11:49:00.009-05:00

As has been reported in The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, and elsewhere, the writer Liao Yiwu was detained at an airport in Sichuan Province on his way to Germany to attend lit.Cologne, one of the largest literary festivals in Europe.

Liao Yiwu is a member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC) and the author of the internationally acclaimed book The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up, which was inspired by the oral histories of Studs Terkel. The English translation by Wen Huang was partly funded by a grant from the PEN Translation Fund, and chapters of the book were published in The Paris Review. You can listen to Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch read from the book here, and you can listen to Katie Fishman reading an essay by Yiwu, “My Enemies, My Teachers,” here. (Update: Gourevitch writes about Liao’s detention for the “News Desk” blog at The New Yorker.)

According to the Times, Liao “had been warned in recent days not to attend the Festival, but insisted on exercising his right to travel freely. He was held at a detention center and questioned by police for three hours before he was permitted to go home. He is now under house arrest.”

After the Tiananmen Square protests, Liao wrote an epic poem, “Massacre,” and recorded himself reading it. The poem got him four years in prison. This is the thirteenth time he’s been detained by the Chinese goverment.

In an email to PEN American Center, Liao said: “Words alone cannot express my outrage. I’m a writer and never considered myself a political dissident. But Liu Xiaobo was right when he said, ‘To gain and preserve your freedom and dignity, there is no other way except to fight.’”

(The drawing of Liao Yiwu above, done over a newspaper article about his writing, is by Larry Roibal; click to enlarge.)

“Reckoning with Torture” in Washington, D.C.

2010-02-24T16:20:00.005-05:00

Back in October, PEN and the ACLU teamed up for “Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the ‘War on Terror’.” Don DeLillo, George Saunders, Eve Ensler, and many others read from declassified legal memos, tribunal transcripts, and sworn statements made by both military personnel and detainees, in an attempt to call attention to the torture policies of the last eight years and to push for legal accountability and moral reckoning.

Next Wednesday, March 3, at Georgetown Law School’s Hart Auditorium, we will present a similar program, this time featuring three members of the United States Congress—House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, Keith Ellison (the first Muslim ever elected to the U.S. Congress), and Bobby Scott—along with Paul Auster, Alice McDermott, Aasif Mandvi of The Daily Show, and many others. This event happens in the wake of a report issued by the Office of Legal Counsel’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which criticized the authors of the torture memos for “poor judgment,” but did not recommend any disciplinary action.

Join us if you’re in D.C. If not, you can watch it live here. You can also watch the October event in its entirely on PEN’s YouTube page. Below, Don DeLillo reads “a generic description of the process” used to interrogate “high value detainees” under the Bush administration.

Goodreads in Iran, Esterházy in New York, Achebe on Baldwin—and other links

2010-02-17T15:19:00.008-05:00

* On the same day that PEN and five other organizations announced a campaign to win the release of more than 60 writers, journalists, and bloggers currently imprisoned in Iran (a campaign entitled “Our Society Will Be A Free Society”), the community manager of Goodreads revealed that the Iranian government appears to have banned their website in Iran. Today, as part of the “Our Society Will Be A Free Society” campaign, PEN and its partner organizations called on Iran to allow United Nations human rights experts into the country.

* On March 1, acclaimed Hungarian writer Peter Esterházy will read from his masterwork, Celestial Harmonies, at the 92nd Street Y, with musical accompaniment provided by his friend the composer András Schiff. A conversation will follow. Read PEN America contributor Alesksandar Hemon’s review of Celestial Harmonies before you go. (Afterwards, read Esterházy’s conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum in PEN America 9: Checkpoints and translator Judith Sollosy on Esterházy right here on the blog—and finally you should read Judith’s translation of Not Art, which was published yesterday, and is, as I understand it, about mothers, as Celestial Harmonies is about fathers.)

* PEN is reflecting on Black History Month with a terrific online feature that includes, among many other things, the audio of Chinua Achebe paying tribute to James Baldwin, video of Chris Abani in conversation with Walter Mosley, and a comic by Mat Johnson.

* The latest contributor to Granta’s online series New Voices is Billy Kahora, who studied in Scotland and now lives in Kenya. His story is intriguingly titled “The Gorilla’s Apprentice.”

* Lastly, our latest issue received a lovely review on NewPages.com. Among the highlights of the issue, according to reviewer Terri Denton: “The Anthology of Small Homes” by Sara Majka, a short story that Denton calls “a masterpiece—it’s that good.”

“Our Society Will Be A Free Society”

2010-02-12T14:14:00.005-05:00

PEN has joined forces with The Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Sans Frontières, Index on Censorship, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, and the International Publishers Association for “Our Society Will Be A Free Society,” a campaign to free writers imprisoned in Iran after last year’s disputed presidential election there.

The campaign was named for a pledge the Ayatollah Khomenei made during the 1979 Iranian revolution to protect freedom of expression, a promise that has not been kept. The Iranian-Canadian journalist and documentary filmmaker Maziar Bahari helped kick off the campaign with an op-ed in The International Herald Tribune, which describes his experience after being arrested last year:

Your government had issued me a press card. But I was coerced to make a false televised confession admitting that I was acting as an agent of evil Western media. I was forced to say the media are trying to overthrow the Islamic government. I was beaten and threatened with execution to make that confession. I was beaten again after the show because I did not perform as well as my interrogator would have liked. Yes, Ayatollah Khamenei, I had to apologize to you on television to stop my torturer from punching me in the head.

Before last year’s election, the Iranian novelist Shahriar Mandanipour called attention to the restrictions on freedom of expression in his country with a novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story. (That novel grew out of a story he describes in the essay “The Life of a Word,” published in PEN America 8: Making Histories.)

Mandanipour’s novel was praised last month on the blog of The New York Review of Books by Claire Messud. Censoring an Iranian Love Story, she notes, “is not only directly concerned with contemporary Iran... it is also playfully engaged with Persian literary history, and at the same time, is formally innovative: the influences of Calvino and Kafka are evident in his ironic narrator’s metafictional banter.”

In other news about free expression—and the lack thereof—PEN president Anthony Appiah has expressed his profound disappointment—though not surprise—at the news that the Chinese government has rejected the appeal of Liu Xiaobo's 11-year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power”:

Liu Xiaobo’s three words to the court—‘I am innocent’—stand as an unanswered indictment of the system that condemned him; they will echo in China and around the world until he is released.

Nobel Peace Prize nominations

2010-02-02T13:40:00.007-05:00

Yesterday, Anthony Appiah, the current president of PEN American Center, published a letter nominating Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace Prize, citing Liu’s “distinguished and principled leadership in the area of human and political rights and freedom of expression.”

Appiah’s letter was endorsed by a number of prominent PEN members, among them Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Jhumpa Lahiri, and several of the writers who rallied for Liu Xiaobo on New Year’s Eve, including Edward Albee, E.L. Doctorow, and A.M. Homes (pictured right is a sign from the rally; the photo was taken by Brian Montopoli).

Vaclav Havel, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama have also asked the Nobel committee to consider Liu for the Peace Prize.

Ma Zhaoxu, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, “said it would be a mistake to give Liu such an award,” according to Ben Blanchard and Huang Yan of Reuters:

“If the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to such a person, it is obvious that it is totally wrong,” Ma told a regular news briefing in Beijing, without elaborating.

No citizen of China has ever won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Meanwhile, according to the AP, the head of Norway’s Conservative Party, Erna Solberg, nominated Russian human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina and her group Memorial for the Prize. PEN worked with Memorial to honor Natalia Estemirova, who was affiliated with Memorial, in October. Estemirova herself spoke with David Remnick about slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya at a 2006 PEN World Voices event; you can listen to their conversation at PEN.org.

Footnote to Zamora, news on Ramadan, reckoning with torture

2010-01-26T13:29:00.015-05:00

One of the villains in “Public Demons,” the essay by José Rubén Zamora excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself and reprinted in The Utne Reader, was indicted in U.S. federal court on money-laundering charges yesterday. Alfonso Portillo was the president of Guatemala from 2000 to 2004. “The day Portillo came to my house,” Zamora writes, “he offered me $600,000 not to send my family out of the country because this—in his words—would affect his image.” The military had just violently raided Zamora’s house, terrorizing his family, after Zamora published unflattering things about the government and the military.

In other legal news, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed orders effectively ending the exclusion of Tariq Ramadan from the United States last week, which should resolve a lawsuit filed by PEN together with the ACLU, the American Association of University Professors, and the American Academy of Religions. (Ramadan is pictured right, appearing via video at the PEN World Voices festival during his exclusion.)

In 2004 Ramadan was prevented from accepting a tenured position at the University of Notre Dame when the Department of Homeland Security refused his visa application. He had been to the U.S. many times before; in 2002 he participated in a conference hosted by former president (and PEN America contributor!) Bill Clinton called “Islam and America in a Global World.” The refusal of Ramadan’s re-entry into the United States was an example of “ideological exclusion,” a Cold War practice that was revived after 9/11.

And speaking of post-9/11 policies: On March 3, PEN and the ACLU will hold another “Reckoning with Torture” event, this time in Washington, D.C. The event we held in New York in October was attended by seven hundred people and presented, I think, a moving and powerful account of what has taken place in the name of the United States over the last eight years (video here).

By the way, PEN’s Freedom to Write director, Larry Siems, is writing an account of U.S. torture policy post-9/11 for the ACLU, and he’s presenting the work online as he writes it, posting his thoughts as he goes (like this take on John Yoo’s recent Daily Show appearance) and getting feedback from experts. Check out The Torture Report.

Another writer detained in China + news from Haiti

2010-01-15T14:55:00.009-05:00

Zhao Shiying, whose pen name is Zhao Dagong, was detained earlier this week, after police officers searched his home and took his wife and son in for questioning. Zhao joined the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC) in 2004, becoming a board member the following year and the Secretary General this past October.

Zhao’s detention may have resulted from his support for former ICPC President Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Christmas for “inciting subversion of state power.” Zhao is one of the original signers of Charter 08, a declaration calling for political reform in China, which was cited in the verdict sentencing Liu.

The day after Zhao was detained, Google announced that the company would reconsider its relationship with China, after detecting “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from” China. Google, according to the announcement, has “evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.”

Microsoft, meanwhile, plans to stay in China, as Peter Foster reports from Beijing for The Daily Telegraph, putting that decision in the context of Zhao Shiying's arrest.

Even sadder news for PEN this week comes of course from Haiti, where Georges Anglade, a writer and activist and the founder of PEN Haiti (he was imprisoned there in 1974), was among the thousands of victims of the country’s worst earthquake in two centuries. His wife Mireille was also killed. The president of International PEN, John Ralston Saul, has written a tribute to Anglade for The Globe and Mail.

Writers Simon Winchester and Edwidge Danticat are working to educate readers about the situation in Haiti, as The Christian Science Monitor reports. Danticat, a native of the country (who wrote about fear for us last year), has spoken about the situation there—and the country’s history and culture—with NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and Democracy Now.

Winchester will speak about the earthquake at Idlewild Books on Tuesday, January 19, along with a relief worker from the United Nations, with suggested donations—and any proceeds from the sale of both Winchester’s books and the books in Idlewild’s section on Haiti—going to relief efforts.

Our contributors elsewhere

2010-01-06T13:24:00.009-05:00

Two of my favorite literary conversationalists, Aleksandar Hemon and Colum McCann, talk with each other in this month’s Believer. (McCann used a line from Hemon’s The Lazarus Project as the epigraph for his National Book Award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin, which was excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.)

AH: Here is the news, Mr. McCann: novels do not solve problems, though ideally they cause some. And if a Katrina novel would be a noble effort, that does not mean it would be any good—and if it is not good, then the pain and suffering and humiliation would have been misused for a literary tryout. You don’t practice your craft on other people’s tragedy.... published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.
CM: But I’ve never even dreamt that novels can solve problems. If they could we’d have no problems, or more likely no novels. And you’re right, the Guantánamo novel will probably take twenty years. But here is the flipside of the news: Stories have to be told over and over again, lest we forget them. Here, I think you make a mistake. You’re assuming once told is always told. Which I fear is the problem of how history is presented.

Hemon’s line about “other people’s tragedy” (and even his specific example of “a Katrina novel”) reminded me of Anya Ulinich’s story “The Nurse and the Novelist,” which appeared in PEN America 9: Checkpoints and prompted considerable discussion. (His remarks elsewhere in the conversation echo his contribution to our latest forum.)

And Colum’s reply called to mind his recent op-ed in The New York Times (where Hemon, too, has occasionally appeared), about the way fiction can shape our ideas about history: “Kennedy and Johnson traipse along feeling the weight of the things they have carried, and Bill Clinton sounds out the saxophone alongside the white noise.”

Fellow PEN America contributor Lydia Davis also showed up on the op-ed page of the Times recently, with a piece called “Everyone Is Invited,” published on Christmas Eve. Davis also conversed publicly not long ago, participating in a live chat on the website of The New Yorker. One reader asked about her story “Jury Duty,” and got this illuminating reply: “I don’t think too much before I plunge in and write the story. I knew I wanted to write about my experience of it, and then I found the form—David Foster Wallace’s question and answer, with the question blank.”

Lastly, a transcript of the recent PEN event honoring Natalia Estemirova is now online at HELO magazine, for those who couldn't be there.

P.S. As another update to the posts below, see this post on The Daily Beast about the New Year’s Eve rally for Liu Xiaobo, featuring a transcript of E.L. Doctorow’s closing remarks about what happens when a nation’s “poets and writers and artists, its thinkers and intellectuals, are muzzled in silence.”

Rally tomorrow @ NYPL, 11 a.m.

2009-12-30T12:39:00.015-05:00

Update: Read Brian Montopoli's report on the rally at CBSNews.com.

On the steps of the New York Public Library: Hilma Wolitzer, A.M. Homes, Edward Albee, E.L. Doctorow, Honor Moore, Jessica Hagedorn, Steve Eisenberg, Don DeLillo, and Victoria Redel. More photos here.

Tomorrow at 11 a.m., on the steps of the New York Public Library, E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Edward Albee, A.M. Homes, Honor Moore, and others will read briefly from Liu's writings and call for his release.

Liu was sentenced on Christmas to 11 years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power." Read the verdict; learn more about the case; then email Hu Jintao and tell him to release Liu Xiaobo.

JOIN PEN
FOR A RALLY FOR
THE RELEASE OF LIU XIAOBO

When: New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2009
Where: Front steps of the New York Public Library, 5th Ave. at 42nd St., New York City
What time: 11:00 a.m.

With E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Edward Albee, A.M. Homes, Honor Moore, and other PEN Members

Press who plan to attend should RSVP to sarah@pen.org

Liu Xiaobo's So-Called Crimes

2009-12-26T14:46:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, the Chinese government sentenced writer Liu Xiaobo to 11 years in prison and an additional two years’ deprivation of political rights for “inciting subversion of state power.” PEN American Center President Kwame Anthony Appiah released this statement when the verdict was announced early on Christmas day.

As we have frequently noted, Liu is not only one of China’s most important and acclaimed dissident voices, he is also a PEN colleague. Liu was one of the founding members of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC), and he served as the center’s president from 2003 to 2007 and afterwards continued to serve on its board of directors.

Yesterday afternoon, Liu’s colleagues at ICPC sent us the first bits of the official verdict of the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court—the exact passages from Liu’s writing that were judged to be subversive.

Liu was sentenced to 11 years in prison for seven sentences from five articles he posted on the Internet and two sentences from Charter 08—a total of 224 Chinese characters. Here they are:

From “Further Questions about Child Slavery in China’s Kilns” (2007):

Since the Communist Party of China (CPC) took power, generations of CPC dictators have cared most about their own power and least about human life.

From “The CPC’s Dictatorial Patriotism” (2005):

The official patriotism advocated by the CPC dictatorship is a fallacious system of “substituting the party for the country.” The essence of this patriotism is to demand that the people love the dictatorship, the one-party rule, and the dictators. It usurps patriotism in order to inflict disasters on the nation and calamities on the people.

From “The Many Aspects of CPC Dictatorship”:

Thus, all of the tricks used by the CPC are stop-gap measures for the dictators to preserve the last phase of their power and will not be able to support for long this dictatorial edifice that is already showing countless cracks.

From “Changing the Regime by Changing Society” (2006):

Changing the Regime by Changing Society

From “Can it be that the Chinese People Deserve Only ‘Party-Led Democracy’?” (2006):

For the emergence of a free China, placing hope in the ruler of a “New Deal” is an idea far worse than placing hope in the continuous expansion of the “new force” among the people.

From “The Negative Effects of the Rise of Dictatorship on World Democratization” (2006):

[Nothing was actually quoted from the article]

From Charter 08 (2008):

“One-party monopolization of ruling privileges should be abolished….”; and

“…to establish China’s federal republic under the structure of democracy and constitutionalism.”

I can't imagine a clearer violation of the right to freedom of expression as it is guaranteed under both international law and China’s own constitution, than to send someone to prison for 11 years for subversion on the basis of these sentences.

In a statement released yesterday in London, International PEN President John Ralston Saul responded this way to China’s claims that international protests over Liu Xiaobo’s trial amounted to interference in its internal affairs:

“Liu Xiaobo's case is about agreed international human rights standards, not merely the internal affairs of China. China is signatory to international treaties and conventions, and cannot be given a free pass when it acts against its own and international standards.”

He is absolutely right. We have entered a new phase in the fight to win Liu Xiaobo’s release; stay tuned for more information about what you can do to help in the days and weeks ahead. Meanwhile, one of the first things we all can do is read more of the essays these supposedly subversive words are taken from in their full context. Human Rights in China has excerpts, with links to the full original pieces in Chinese, here.

Then we should repeat the offending phrases over and over and send them around the world.

Email Hu Jintao, tell him to release Liu Xiaobo

2009-12-22T15:43:00.006-05:00

Liu Xiaobo, poet and dissident, will be tried tomorrow morning in China (8 p.m. tonight Eastern Standard Time) for “inciting subversion of state power.” He was charged after helping to write Charter 08, a manifesto calling for democratic reforms, and he faces up to fifteen years if convicted.

Over on the main PEN website, you'll find a very easy to use form for emailing Hu Jintao, President of the People’s Republic of China, and Cao Jianmin, the Procurator General, demanding Liu Xiaobo's release.

So help us flood their inboxes. And stay tuned.

“...past get-ready, almost at get-set...”

2009-12-18T14:40:00.004-05:00

Stephen Burt’s review of Easy, Marie Ponsot’s sixth collection of poems, is in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. Burt closes the review with lines from “Dancing Day II,” which, along with “Dancing Day I,” closes our latest issue.

We’ve put both poems online, and I’ve posted the second one below, along with video of Marie reading an untitled poem by Scott Walt that received honorable mention for poetry in PEN’s 2004 Prison Writing Contest. Marie has worked closely with the Prison Writing Program for years, and her thoughts on the “inner exile” of prison appear in PEN America 9: Checkpoints.

Burt praises "Dancing Day II” as “tender, alert, self-ironized and finally unillusioned,” noting that its “coming event is at once the end of a life and the sociable delight of another night out.”

Dancing Day II

Once, one made many.
Now, many make one.
The rest is requiem.

We’re running out of time, so
we’re hurrying home to
practice to
gether for the general dance.
We’re past get-ready, almost at get-set.
Here we come many to
dance as one.

Plenty more lost selves keep arriving, some
we weren’t waiting for. We stretch and
lace up practice shoes. We mind our manners—
no staring, just snatching a look
—strict and summative—
at each other’s feet & gait & port.

Every one we ever were shows up
with world-flung poor triumphs
flat in the back-packs we set down to greet
each other. Glad tired gaudy
we are more than we thought
& as ready as we’ll ever be.

We’ve all learned the moves, separately,

from the absolute dancer
the foregone deep breather
the original choreographer.

Imitation’s limitation—but who cares.
We’ll be at our best on dancing day.
On dancing day
we’ll belt out tunes we’ll step to
together
till it’s time for us to say
there’s nothing more to say
nothing to pay no way
pay no mind pay no heed
pay as we go.
Many is one; we’re out of here,
exeunt omnes

exit oh and save
this last dance for me

on the darkening ground
looking up into
the last hour of left light
in the star-stuck east,
its vanishing flective, bent
breathlessly.

“Reality cannot be copyrighted”

2009-12-16T14:01:00.008-05:00

The other day an email was forwarded to me by David Shields, whose “Mimesis” appears in PEN America 11: Make Believe. The author of the email was another writer (and reader of the journal) who found “Mimesis” inspiring; it helped him, he said, to think about his own work.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece we published:

The novel has always been a mixed form; that’s why it was called “novel” in the first place. A great deal of realistic documentary, some history, some topographical writing, some barely disguised autobiography have always been part of the novel, from Defoe through Flaubert and Dickens. It was Henry James (especially in his correspondence with H.G. Wells) who tried to assert that the novel, as an “art form,” must be the work of the imagination alone, and who was responsible for much of the modernist purifying of the novel’s mongrel tradition. I see writers like Naipaul and Sebald as making a necessary postmodernist return to the roots of the novel as an essentially Creole form, in which “nonfiction” material is ordered, shaped, and imagined as “fiction.” Books like these restore the novelty of the novel, with its ambiguous straddling of verifiable and imaginary facts, and restore the sense of readerly danger that one enjoys in reading Moll Flanders or Clarissa or Tom Jones or Vanity Fair—that tightrope walk along the margin between the newspaper report and the poetic vision. Some Graham Greene novel has the disclaimer, “This is a work of fiction. No person in it bears any resemblance to any actual person living or dead, etc., etc. London does not exist.”

An endnote adds: “[Jonathan] Raban assures me that Greene’s disclaimer... exists, but I can’t find it.”*

“Mimesis” is part of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, which will be published in February. The book consists of numbered sections of various lengths (the one above is roughly medium-sized; some are a few lines, some a page or two), and, according to the jacket copy, it “argues that our culture is obsessed with ‘reality’ precisely because we experience hardly any.” According to Zadie Smith, on the other hand, who wrote about the book recently in The Guardian, the book “argues passionately for the superiority of the messy real—of what we might call ‘truthiness’—over the careful creations of novelists, and other artists, who work with artificial and imagined narratives.” (Smith says the book is “thrilling to read, even if you disagree with much of it, as I do.”)

However one chooses to summarize it, the book certainly argues (hence that subtitle), and many readers will argue with it in return—something Shields clearly welcomes, striving as he does to provoke thought about fiction, writing, and modern life. Some readers, like the one I mentioned above, will feel not simply provoked but inspired: “Reality Hunger,” another reader writes, “has got me excited about thinking about novels and about the possibilities of fiction, in 2009 no less, and that’s more than worthwhile in my book.”

If, like some people, you can’t wait to read it, get started with what’s already out there: first, this 2006 essay from The Believer; then “Mimesis,” of course, in PEN America 11; and “All the Best Stories are True,” from issue #9 of A Public Space. After supporting those three literary magazines, you might check out two online excerpts: “Collage,” over at Kneejerk magazine, and “DS” (a PDF).

You should also check out this short essay by Shields, with video accompaniment, about a fight outside a Vietnamese restaurant, captured by videophone and uploaded to YouTube. Not to mention Shields’s contribution to the great “Year in Reading” feature over at The Millions, along with this footnote to that list from John Williams at The Second Pass.

Happy reading.

* A note about this note, and others from the book: Among the many subjects Shields explores are plagiarism and originality; one of the places he addresses those subjects is a preface to the endnotes—which he was apparently disinclined to include:

This book contains many unacknowledged quotations; it contains little else. I’m trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs had but that we have lost. The uncertainty about whose words you are reading is not a bug, but a feature.... Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us. Reality cannot be copyrighted.

Shields seems to be thinking along lines similar to Jonathan Lethem (who has written a blurb for Reality Hunger), who considered the matter in “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.”

Human Rights Day 2009: the Good, the Bad, and the Hopeful

2009-12-10T13:43:00.033-05:00

Most of us tend to measure a year's passage by our birthdays, but in the human rights world, each year is marked and measured by December 10: International Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the birth of the Declaration of Human Rights. Each December 10 has meaning, of course, but 2009 is particularly poignant.

We've witnessed the murders of more writers, journalists, and human rights defenders than we'd ever want to count this year, including Natalia Estemirova, the courageous Chechen activist who was abducted outside her home in Grozny and murdered on July 15.

We've also witnessed the mass arrests of writers and scholars in places like Iran, which responded to popular protests over this year’s election results by handing out outrageous sentences to people like Kian Tajbakhsh, who is now serving 15 years in jail.

And we've witnessed countries blatantly defying their own laws, such as in China's arrest and detention of our own PEN colleague, Liu Xiaobo, who is now spending his second Human Rights Day in silence.

Just two days ago, on the anniversary of his detention, Beijing police handed over Liu's case to the prosecution, which means that he may now be tried for "inciting subversion of state power" within the next month and a half. If convicted, he could face up to 15 years in prison.

In a statement PEN American Center released along with the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC), of which Liu is a former president, Tienchi Liao, ICPC's newly-elected leader, said:

“In order to protect their right to freedom of expression, our brave colleagues are willing to risk their physical freedom. But the authorities cannot put all people who want to express their own thoughts into prison. We are too many.”

And herein lies the good of this story, this troubling year of deaths and arrests and long sentences: people around the world are standing up even straighter, even taller, for their own rights, and are linking arms to protect and fight for the rights of others.

Liu Xiaobo's colleagues, who joined with him last year in signing Charter 08, today released another open letter supporting him. In it, the signatories challenged authorities to arrest all of them as well, for signing this groundbreaking declaration, for sharing the same ideas, for invoking their right to freedom of expression, guaranteed by their own constitution.

And so here at PEN in New York, we are commemorating Human Rights Day by paying tribute to all these brave men and women, in China and all over the world, who are using their pens, using their voices, to stand up for human rights, regardless of the consequences. We stand with them, we stand behind them, and we will continue to fight for them until all our pens, our voices, are free.

As of this morning, at great personal risk, 164 of the original 303 signatories of Charter 08 had added their names to the open letter, entitled "We Are Willing to Share Responsibility with Liu Xiaobo."

JOIN US in taking action for Liu Xiaobo: >> Send a letter to the Chinese government.

photo of Liu Xiaobo and his wife, Liu Xia, courtesy of the Independent Chinese PEN Center.

Translate these books

2009-12-09T13:45:00.009-05:00

The latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation includes a wonderful feature called “Translate This Book!” The editors talked to “some of the top translators into English working today,” to “publishers big and small,” to “agents, journalists, and foreign-language authors,” and then compiled their thoughts on “the best books that still aren’t in English.” It's a great list, with illuminating commentary from those surveyed. Here’s Enrique Vila-Matas on a book by Rodrigo Fresán (whose very funny conversation with Jonathan Lethem ran in PEN America 8: Making Histories, along with part of Fresán's novel Kensington Gardens):

In El fondo del cielo (The Bottom of the Sky), Fresán writes the book that will come immediately after the era of apocalyptic books—the era that began with the Bible and the Aeneid, and culminated with postmodern books about the end of all possible worlds. It’s the book of the future, the book that begins to write itself when everything has ended: the story of two young people in love with planets, and of a disturbingly beautiful girl. Between Bioy Casares and Philip K. Dick, but with a voice all its own, it is both powerful and artistic.

Check out the rest.

As the eagle-eyed (and long-memoried) M.A. Orthofer points out, we did something similar in PEN America 2: Home and Away, asking members of PEN “What great books have never been translated into English?” We got great responses from Ariel Dorfman, Lily Tuck, Harry Mathews, Geoffrey O’Brien, and many others. (Dorfman, by the way, managed to sneak in another recommendation in our latest forum: Ayer ya es maňana, or Yesterday Is Already Tomorrow, by Eduardo Vladimiroff).

That forum led to PEN Recommends, an updated feature on the PEN website which lists books not yet translated into English.

Orthofer also flagged a response to the same question by the translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in an interview for The Millions by Anna Clark. Surprisingly, Pevear and Volokhonsky—best known for their translations of Anna Karenina and other Russian classics—did not focus on Russian writers in their reply, but Italian ones, singling out Alberto Savinio, Cristina Campo, and Guido Ceronetti.

And yet another reply appeared on the film blog that Richard Brody—who won the 2009 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography* for Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard—maintains for The New Yorker. In The Quarterly Conversation, Turkish writer Murat Nemet-Nejat suggested Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma. Brody seconds that suggestion before adding:

...another Godard-related book is desperately in need of translation: “En Attendant Godard” (“Waiting for Godard”), the journalist, novelist, and (later) screenwriter and director Michel Vianey’s account of accompanying Godard through the production of “Masculine Feminine,” in 1965-66. It’s the most illuminating and evocative book about movie-making I know; it came out in 1967 and has never even been reissued in France. (The author, who became a close friend of mine, died last December at the age of seventy-eight.)

* The deadline to submit a book for the 2010 award is Monday. Deadlines for other PEN awards are mostly in January. More information here.

The Private Lives of Trees

2009-12-04T11:08:00.003-05:00

Over at Three Percent, Chad Post of Open Letter has been running a series of brief profiles with accomplished translators called “Making the Translator Visible.” Each post includes a photograph of the featured translator and a short Q & A. The idea was hatched by Chad and Megan McDowell, herself a translator—the first to be profiled in the series (note: that is not Megan on the right; see below).

Chad asks the translators for their favorite words (in any language) and the best translations they feel they’ve done so far. Megan McDowell’s favorite word is murcielago, Spanish for “bat” (a popular choice, it turns out), and the best translation she’s done so far, she says, is The Private Lives of Trees—which, as it happens, will be published by Open Letter in May and is excerpted in the new issue of PEN America.

The Private Lives of Trees is by the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra (pictured above); it’s a beautiful, beguiling book that centers on a young, self-deprecating professor named Julián:

Lately he has started to think he should have been a dentist or geologist or meteorologist. For now, his actual job seems strange: professor. But his true calling, he thinks now, is to have dandruff. He imagines himself answering that way:

“What do you do?”

“I have dandruff.”

Julián has a stepdaughter named Daniela, and one night, while he waits for his wife Verónica to return home, he “distracts the little girl with a story about the private lives of trees.”

The poplar and the baobab are talking about the crazy people who visit the park. They agree, beforehand, that there are a lot of crazy people who go to the park. The park is full of crazies, but my personal favorite crazy person, says the baobab, is a woman with very long arms who came to talk to me one time. I remember it like it was yesterday, although it was long ago, I must have been barely two hundred fifteen or two hundred twenty when she came, you hadn’t even been born yet.

Immediately Julián realizes he has made a mistake: Daniela awakes from her doze, surprised by the poplar’s age, and especially because she thought that the poplar and the baobab had always lived together, that’s why they were such good friends, because they had spent their lives planted in the park together. To get out of it, he makes up a nervous string of dates, from which is gathered that the baobab is one thousand five hundred years old and the poplar barely forty. Daniela is still confused and Julián continues, conscious that he will have to work hard to recuperate the tale.

Zambra’s work has also been featured in Zoetrope: All Story and discussed at length in The Nation by the critic Marcela Valdes. His first book, Bonsai, won Chile’s Literary Critics’ Award for Best Novel; it was translated into English by the American writer Carolina de Robertis and published by Melville House. Zambra’s writing is lyrical and funny and smart; check it out.

“A crackpot chemist of words”: Nam Le talks with Richard Ford

2009-11-30T10:42:00.008-05:00

“Is literature about ‘understanding’? Does that make sense to you?” So Richard Ford asks Nam Le (pictured left, in a photo by Nigel Parry taken for Esquire) in the pages of PEN America 11: Make Believe. The conversation is called “Fabrications,” and part of it is online (for the rest you'll need to buy the issue).

Nam tells Ford no, it doesn’t make sense to him; Ford says that makes him happy. To which Nam replies: “You shouldn’t take any comfort in that—a lot of things don’t make sense to me.” “I take my comfort where I take my comfort,” Ford responds.

The conversation is full of such quick, barbed, and illuminating back-and-forths. Ford asks Le about writers and place (“I think we’re all in an eternal nowhere all the time,” Le says), writers and lying (“what you’re doing as a writer is engaging in a big con”), writers and science (“I think of myself as an unashamed vitalist, a crackpot chemist of words”), writers and politics (“I think we use the word ‘politics’ the way we use the word ‘emotion’... ‘Aw, I got really emotional at that point,’ we say, as though emotion is something that exists on the edge of experience... but we’re awash in an ocean of emotion all the time”).

Eventually Le gets going about the problems with “character-based fiction.” He doesn't want readers, he says, to think that “a story between this person and that person is the ambassadorial story for their time and place in history.” And they go on to discuss writing reviews (or not), Nam’s story “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” and the way that writing fiction can be, as Ford puts it, “a kind of clerical nightmare.”

Read the online portion, then pick up a copy and enjoy the rest.

PS. There are two PEN events coming up soon. The first is on Wednesday, December 2, at Housing Works at 7 pm. Uwem Akpan, Juan Felipe Herrera, Lily Hoang, and Brendan Curry will talk with Jane Ciabattari of the National Book Critics Circle in celebration of the 2009 Beyond Margins Awards.

Then, a week from today, at 6:30 pm at NYU Law School, a group writers, legal scholars, and advocates including Nadine Strossen, Laura W. Murphy, Walter Dean Myers, Jonathan Todres, Deborah Ellis, Uzodinma Iweala, and Susan Kuklin will discuss the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which the U.N. General Assembly unanimously adopted in 1989 and which was instituted as international law in 1990. The U.S. and Somalia remain the only two U.N. member nations that have not ratified this document.

Both events are free and open to the public.

Congrats to Colum

2009-11-19T11:07:00.006-05:00

Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin, excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, won the National Book Award for fiction last night.

As those who come to the PEN World Voices Festival know, Colum is also a great conversationalist, and he has talked with several writers in our pages. In PEN America 8: Making Histories, he talked with Arthur Japin*, Laila Lalami, Imma Monsó, and Michael Wallner about “inventing the past” and with David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Anne Provoost, and Jeanette Winterson about “writing myth now.” Fear Itself includes not only “A Code for the Disappeared,” the piece adapted from Let the Great World Spin, but also Colum’s great conversation with Michael Ondaatje, in which Colum asked Ondaatje, “Do you have fun?”

In that conversation with Ondaatje Colum describes his job as a writer in a way that will likely resonate with those who love Let the Great World Spin:

My responsibility, I think—which I’ve learned from you and John Berger and other writers I love and admire—is to talk about the dark, anonymous corners of human experience and about the value of those dark, anonymous corners. And intersecting with those dark, anonymous corners you have these famous lives, these big desires, and big issues.

Congratulations to a wonderful writer.

(Photo of Colum McCann and Michael Ondaatje by Beowulf Sheehan.)

* Speaking of Arthur Japin, his novel Director’s Cut, narrated by a filmmaker not unlike Federico Fellini and excerpted in Making Histories, will be published by Knopf in English in February.

Obama in China & other links

2009-11-16T13:14:00.010-05:00

As you may have heard, Barack Obama has addressed the matter of press freedom on his visit to China. PEN American Center has been calling for Obama to speak up for free expression on this visit (see the letter signed by PEN president K. Anthony Appiah). It appears that Obama’s comments are being censored from Chinese news reports.

A “leading” member of president Nicolas Sarkozy’s party in France, one Éric Raoult, is arguing that the latest winner of the Prix Goncourt, the nation’s highest literary prize, should “be censured and asked to recant” for comments she made back in August about “the climate of heavy policing and surveillance [under Sarkozy].” Marie Ndiaye won the Goncourt for Trois femmes puissantes (Three Powerful Women), and she is the first black woman to win the award.

Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin, excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, is up for the National Book Award this week, and it also tops Amazon’s “Best of 2009” (via The Millions).

Back around Halloween, Gigantic talked with Brian Evenson about horror movies. (Evenson’s brilliant and eerie story “Windeye” appears in PEN America 11: Make Believe and is also available on the PEN website.)

Lastly, The Rumpus has several good literary pieces up:

a long interview with Paul Auster, whose latest novel, Invisible, was deemed his finest ever by Clancy Martin in The New York Times Book Review

excerpts from a piece by Sigrid Nunez on Susan Sontag (who said, “I saw the best writers of my generation destroyed by teaching,” Nunez recalls) that was recently published in Tin House (read Nunez's story "Rapture Children" in our new issue)

and a tribute to An African in Greenland by Terese Svoboda (“I understand my curiosity about sex but why do I adore reading about bad food?” she asks), whose lovely contribution to our “Make Believe” forum is up on the PEN website, along with a bunch of other interesting responses (post your own!)

Poems by Liu Xiaobo, translated by Jeffrey Yang, read by Paul Auster

2009-11-05T17:28:00.006-05:00

I’ve mentioned Liu Xiaobo before. The renowned literary critic, writer, and political activist was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in 1989 when he decided to return to China to support the pro-democracy movement. He staged a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square and led calls for a broad-based, sustainable democratic movement. He helped prevent further bloodshed by supporting and advancing a call for non-violence.

He spent two years in prison for his troubles, and three years of “reeducation through labor” beginning in 1996 after he publicly questioned the role of the single-party system and called for dialogue between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama of Tibet.

More recently, he co-authored Charter 08, a declaration calling for political reform that has been signed by hundreds of individuals from all walks of life throughout China. He was detained in December of last year and formally arrested in June, charged with “inciting subversion of state power.” If convicted, he could face up to 15 years in prison. Liu Xia, his wife, has only been permitted to visit him twice.

Friends of Liu gave some of his poems to Larry Siems and Sarah Hoffman, who have been spearheading PEN American Center’s China Campaign, last year, and for the most recent issue of PEN America, the excellent American poet Jeffrey Yang (who earlier this year won the PEN/Osterweil Award for Poetry) translated four of them. Liu dedicated each one to his wife, Xia. Judging from the dates, most (and perhaps all) of the poems appear to have been composed during his three years of “reeducation.” Paul Auster read the poems at our launch party, and later recorded his readings. Here is the first of the poems that he read:

One Letter Is Enough

for Xia

one letter is enough
for me to transcend and face
you to speak

as the wind blows past
the night
uses its own blood
to write a secret verse
that reminds me each
word is the last word

the ice in your body
melts into a myth of fire
in the eyes of the executioner
fury turns to stone

two sets of iron rails
unexpectedly overlap
moths flap toward lamp
light, an eternal sign
that traces your shadow

8. 1. 2000

You can both read and listen to all the poems here. The U.S. Congress, by the way, passed a resolution calling for Liu’s release just a few weeks ago. You can sign a petition calling for his release here, and you can hear, and watch, Liu himself talking about democracy and free expression here.

Nov. 9: Bogosian, Gaitskill, Turturro & others read prison writing

2009-11-03T11:10:00.003-05:00

Next Monday, November 9, PEN’s Prison Writing Program will hold its second annual benefit reading and reception, with readings by Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian, John Turturro, Patricia Smith, Jamal Joseph, Lemon Andersen, and other guests. As an installment of WNYC’s signature series “The NEXT New York Conversation,” this event will be broadcast and live-streamed, allowing incarcerated men and women with radio and/or internet access to listen to the event and join our audience.

Tickets available here. Full details below.

Breakout: Voices from Inside

When: Monday, November 9
Where: WNYC Greene Space, 44 Charlton Street, NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

With Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian, John Turturro, Patricia Smith, Jamal Joseph, Lemon Andersen, and other guests

Tickets: Collaborator: $75/Friend: $50

Collaborator ticket covers the expenses of one-on-one mentoring services between a PEN member and an incarcerated man or woman for one year. This premier ticket includes the best views and a reception following the program.

Friend ticket covers the postage and printing costs to provide eight incarcerated men and women with a free copy of PEN’s Handbook for Writers in Prison. This ticket includes a reception following the program.

At “Breakout: Voices from Inside,” PEN Members and friends will read award-winning work from PEN’s Prison Writing Program. For more than 30 years, the Program has been dedicated to helping make the harsh realities of American imprisonment part of our social justice dialogue. The Prison Writing Program has also been on the front-lines of prison reform, helping inmates in federal, state, and local penitentiaries cope with life behind bars, gain skills, and have a voice while they are there. “Breakout: Voices from Inside” will help raise much-needed funds to enable our important program to continue its most important mission into the future—helping incarcerated men and women to see themselves in a new way: as writers.

Our contributors elsewhere

2009-10-28T14:04:00.007-04:00

Cynthia Ozick’s essay “Ghost Writers,” which was published in PEN America 9: Checkpoints, is in the new edition of Best American Essays.

José Rubén Zamora’s description of a raid on his house by the Guatemalan military, published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, is in the new issue of The Utne Reader.

Over at The Reading Experience, Daniel Green is disappointed by the new Tin House anthology, but praises the contribution of Lucy Corin (“the only essay in this book that makes it worth having”), whose “Seven Small Apocalypses” ran in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

Lynne Tillman, whose contribution to our forum on “make believe” has just gone online, is interviewed at The Millions.

Rabih Alameddine, whose contribution to our forum on “make believe” I mentioned on Monday, writes about The Twilight Zone, V.S. Naipaul, and creativity for The Rumpus.

On November 9, Mary Gaitskill—who contributed to the forum in PEN America 3: Tribes—will join Eric Bogosian, John Turturro, and others at the second annual benefit reading for the PEN Prison Writing Program. As an installment of WNYC’s signature series “The NEXT New York Conversation,” this event will be broadcast and live-streamed, allowing incarcerated men and women with radio and/or internet access to listen to the event and join our audience. More details here.

And there’s a free PEN event tomorrow: Salman Rushdie—who paid tribute to Ryszard Kapuściński in PEN America 8: Making Histories—will join Keith Gessen, Tanya Lokshina, and others in honoring Natalia Estemirova—the award-winning human rights activist and journalist murdered on July 15, 2009—and discussing the state of dissent and press freedom in Russia. Full details below.

Bearing Witness in Chechnya: The Legacy of Natalia Estemirova

When: Thursday, October 29
Where: Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate School, 365 Fifth Ave., NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

With Salman Rushdie, Michael Arena, Ann Cooper, Keith Gessen, Tanya Lokshina, and Elena Milashina.

Free and open to the public

“Imagine a book you wish had been written...”

2009-10-26T13:16:00.010-04:00

First: If you’re in New York, don’t miss our launch party tonight.

Second: As I mentioned before, we asked a bunch of writers to imagine books they wished had been written, either by themselves or by others, living or dead, real or imaginary. Alternatively, they could tell us something they believed about books and their power (or lack of it).

Aleksandar Hemon said, “If I could imagine it, I could write it,” but acknowledged that he wished he had “written Lolita, or at least ‘Spring in Fialta.’ A few of Chekhov’s stories too.” He added that “Literature—books—provide access to the areas of human knowledge that are not available otherwise. Therefore,” he said, “I am interested exclusively in the things that literature alone can do.”

Rabih Alameddine, whose conversation with Hemon ran in PEN America 9: Checkpoints, was one of several contributors who got to thinking about a beloved author whose writing life was cut short:

I wish Bruno Schulz had written a third book, or a fourth. Maybe he did and it got lost. No one knows for sure. Many writers have died before their time, but because of the horrific manner in which he was killed, and the genius of the two books he left us, I never cease to wonder what could have been. Imagine.

Schulz is a major presence in PEN America 5: Silences, which includes excerpts from his Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, David Grossman’s See Under: Love, and Jerzy Ficowski’s “biographical portrait” of Schulz, along with a conversation between Alan Adelson and Henryk concerning the author. (Grossman paid tribute to Schulz at the World Voices festival—and in the pages of The New Yorker—in the spring. One of Schulz’s self-portraits is reproduced above.)

So what books do you wish existed? Tell us here.

Subscription offer & launch party

2009-10-21T16:39:00.004-04:00

This year, PEN partnered with the long-standing O. Henry Prize, which annually selects twenty of the year’s best stories written in English. The latest edition of the anthology includes stories by Junot Díaz, Nadine Gordimer, Ha Jin, and many other excellent writers.

While supplies last, we are giving copies of The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009 to all new PEN America subscribers. A one-year subscription is just $18, and you can subscribe online at www.pen.org/subscribe.

Subscriptions begin with our brand new issue #11, Make Believe, which we’re celebrating on Monday in New York City. Paul Auster and Roxana Robinson will read short selections from the issue, and several other contributors—including Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Cynthia Cruz, and Lynne Tillman—will also be there. The event is free and open to the public. Details below.

PEN America #11 Launch Party
When: Monday, October 26
Where: Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street (between Sullivan & Thompson), NYC
What time: 6:30–8:30 p.m.

With Paul Auster, Roxana Robinson, and other special guests

Free and open to the public

Faith and fiction: ‘must believe’ vs. ‘make believe’?

2009-10-19T15:44:00.008-04:00

One of the inspirations for PEN America 11: Make Believe was a conversation from the 2009 World Voices Festival moderated by Albert Mobilio of Bookforum and called “Faith and Fiction.” “If we think of fiction as ‘make believe’ and religion as ‘must believe,’” Albert asks, “how might novelists reconcile the ambiguities and uncertainties of their craft with an attempt to express or characterize religious faith?”

The question yields a number of interesting thoughts from panelists Benjamin Anastas, Nadeem Aslam, Brian Evenson, and Jan Kjærstad. Anastas says that while some novelists may be “heretics from belief,” a believer is “a heretic from reality.” Evenson says, echoing Kjærstad, that it’s his job, as a fiction writer, “to be profane, to disrupt or work against the sacred in some way.” All the panelists discuss, at length, the differences and similarities between literature and scripture.

You can read a part of the conversation here (for the whole thing, you need to buy the issue); you can also listen to it.

The conversation is preceded in the issue by a wonderful new short story by Evenson, which, though it doesn’t address religion, is very much concerned with fiction and belief (and which is available online). It’s a subject to which Evenson has given much thought, having been more or less forced out of Brigham Young University, the Mormon school where he was teaching, because of his fiction. Evenson was a practicing Mormon at the time, but what happened at BYU precipitated his later deparature from the church—and religious faith—entirely. (You can read all about what happened in this 2003 Believer essay by Ben Ehrenreich—and you should also check out Evenson’s novel The Open Curtain, begun while he was a believer and finished when he was not.)

There are three other pieces from the issue that both address religious belief and have been made available online: a story adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel Salvation City, forthcoming from Riverhead next year, entitled "Rapture Children”; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s brief remembrance of a Catholic priest named Father Chinedu; and an excerpt from Khaled al-Berry’s memoir, Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise, forthcoming in English later this year.

You might also check out Benjamin Anastas’s essay on this very subject for Bookforum; a long excerpt from Jan Kjærstad’s novel The Discoverer, newly available in English from Open Letter; Nadeem Aslam’s discussion of Islam in relation to his second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers; and a list of good books on doubt from Maud Newton, from which the image above, Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, was taken.

PEN America 11: Make Believe

2009-10-14T11:57:00.004-04:00

The online feature for PEN America 11: Make Believe is now online at PEN.org. The new issue focuses on the question of belief in various forms—religious faith, political commitment, the “willing suspension of disbelief,” and more.

Several pieces from the issue are available online, and I’ll have more about them soon. For now, I want to point your attention to the forum. We sent a number of writers the following prompt:

1 Imagine a book you wish had been written, either by yourself or by someone else, living or dead, real or imaginary;

or

2 Tell us something you believe about books—their power or lack of it, how they change the world or don’t, what they’ve done for you or failed to do.

We published seventeen responses in the issue, and we’ll be posting those at PEN.org over the next few weeks (the first two up are by Terese Svoboda and Amitava Kumar). We’re also looking for your responses. So have a look.

And while you’re there, you can read some haunting fiction, brilliant poems, insightful conversations, and more.

The cover art, by the way, is by the young artist Tyler Bewley.

Check it out. And order your copy! Better yet, subscribe.

George Saunders, Jonathan Ames, Ishmael Beah & others join Tuesday’s lineup

2009-10-08T14:32:00.005-04:00

Regular blogging will resume here later this month, with news about PEN America 11, our contributors appearing elsewhere, and other items of note. In the meantime, an update concerning “Reckoning with Torture: Memos & Testimonies from the 'War on Terror',” taking place Tuesday, October 13, at 7 pm, at the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City.

Jonathan Ames, K. Anthony Appiah, Ishmael Beah, David Cole, Nell Freudenberger, A.M. Homes, Susanna Moore, and George Saunders have joined the roster of readers that already included Matthew Alexander, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Eve Ensler, Jameel Jaffer, Jack Rice, Art Spiegelman, and Amrit Singh. They will read together and separately a variety of documents attesting to acts of torture committed on behalf of the U.S. government since 9/11. The evening will also feature three short videos and a special installation by the artist Jenny Holzer, whose work you can see here and here.

We hope you’ll join us. Tickets are available here (and at the door), and full details are below.

When: Tuesday, October 13
Where: The Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 East 7th St., NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

Tickets: $15/$10 for PEN/ACLU Members and students with valid ID at www.smarttix.com. Tickets may also be purchased at the door.

DeLillo et al read torture memos, 10/13

2009-09-17T16:15:00.011-04:00

On October 13, PEN American Center will team up with the ACLU to stage a public reading of recently-released government files—memos (like this one: PDF), declassified communications, and testimonies by detainees—documenting acts of torture carried out on behalf of the U.S. government since September 11, 2001. Tickets are on sale here.

The event is part of an ongoing effort by writers associated with PEN to call attention to and reflect on these abuses. Among the participants are writers Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Eve Ensler, and Art Spiegelman. They will be joined by former U.S. interrogator Matthew Alexander, former CIA officer Jack Rice, ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh, and the artist Jenny Holzer.

I'll be sharing more news about this project in the future; in the meantime, full details for the October 13 event are below.

When: Tuesday, October 13
Where: The Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 East 7th St., NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

Tickets: $15/$10 for PEN/ACLU Members and students with valid ID at www.smarttix.com. Tickets may also be purchased at the door.

(The note card pictured above is explained here; click on the photo to enlarge. The lines on the card are from "To Be Human," a short piece by Anouar Benmalek published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.)

This Sunday: Brooklyn Book Festival

2009-09-11T16:28:00.006-04:00

The day after tomorrow, PEN will (as in years past) spend a September Sunday at the Brooklyn Book Festival, a wonderful event full of bookish people and organizations of all kinds.

PEN also has a public program at the festival, which we're co-sponsoring with Tin House. Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia will feature readings (from this new anthology of new Russian fiction) by Dale Peck, Francine Prose, Anya Ulinich (whose excellent and much-discussed story "The Nurse and the Novelist" was in PEN America 9: Checkpoints), and Vadim Yarmolinets. Also, Emily Gould, who has written about Russian-American writers for Russia! magazine, will interview Rasskazy contributor Dmitry Danilov about the literary scene back in the mother country.

Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia

When: Sunday, September 13
Where: Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza: Brooklyn Heights, NYC
What time: 1:00–1:50 p.m.

Free and open to the public.

This event immediately follows "Name that Author," a game of literary trivia sponsored by the National Book Critics Circle in which I'll represent PEN America and attempt to carry on PEN's proud trivia tradition by dethroning last year's champion, Brigid Hughes of A Public Space.

Hope to see you Sunday.

Reading for Labor Day

2009-09-04T11:58:00.010-04:00

PEN America 10: Fear Itself features excerpts from Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, by Studs Terkel, who, a few years before he died, contributed a tribute to John Steinbeck to PEN America 4: Fact/Fiction. The issue’s title, of course, came from the Depression era, and the issue was inspired in part by the growing sense of anxiety brought on by the current economic crisis.

As we read through Terkel’s book, we discovered that Roosevelt was by no means the only person talking about fear. “The Depression left a legacy of fear,” says Larry Van Dusen, a labor organizer, a point also made by a twenty-three year-old named Marshall, whose parents had lived through the Depression. “People haven’t felt unfearful since,” Marshall says—

Fear of Communists, fear of people living in sin, fear of the hippies—fear, fear, fear. I think people learned it from the Depression. Money brings security, that was the idea. But it turned out to be just the opposite. If you have a great big house, that meant you had to be fearful again: somebody might rob you. If you had a great big store, you had to be fearful now that there’s gonna be a riot—and everything in your store would be stolen. See, money brings more fear than security.

There’s more in the issue—and much more in Terkel’s book, which is a fascinating read. You might also check out these two excellent pieces from Poetry magazine about the Federal Writers’ Project and Kenneth Fearing (one of them by PEN America contributor Robert Polito) and an interview Mark Athitakis did back in April with David Taylor, about his book Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America.

Taylor’s book isn't the only WPA-inspired project of late: there’s also Mark Kurlansky's The Food of a Younger Land, which draws on the work of a “number of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Nelson Algren,” who, as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, “were dispatched all across America to chronicle the eating habits, traditions, and struggles of local people. The project, called America Eats, was abandoned in the early 1940s because of the World War and never completed.”

And then there’s State by State, a WPA-inspired collection of essays about each of the United States, featuring such PEN America contributors as George Packer, Ha Jin, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, and many more.

The poster pictured above was itself produced by the WPA, and can be found at this wonderful website.

Happy Labor Day.

Guest post: Nicole Cooley on Hurricane Katrina, four years later

2009-08-28T18:52:00.008-04:00

Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Nicole Cooley, who grew up in New Orleans and whose poem “The Flood Notebooks” appears in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, reflects on the anniversary.

Go on, I’ve had enough.
Dump my blues down in the Gulf.

—Johnny Cash, “Big River”

It is not you who will speak: let the disaster speak in you.

—Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

In New York, it is raining this weekend—the side effects of Hurricane Danny—and I am wishing I was in New Orleans where I grew up. New Orleans: the easy city to miss—we all know the song, “Do you Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?” The easy city to mythologize—and I have done it—Live Oaks along St Charles Avenue, mint juleps on wrought iron balconies, the French Quarter. I know that it is easier to think about New Orleans if you keep your vision of the city romantic, if you align it with the most popular and resonant clichés.

I am talking about a different New Orleans, the one that four years ago endured the greatest “natural”—or not—disaster in US history: Hurricane Katrina. I am talking about the city that my parents and my friends still live in four years after the storm. I am talking about the New Orleans that former president George Bush and his administration ignored and ruined. The city that people have told me—well meaning people, my friends and neighbors in the Northeast—should not be rebuilt. “Who would live there?” one man said to me. “Everyone knows the city is going to be eventually destroyed. It is only a matter of time.” (“The Status of New Orleans: An Update,” in Friday’s New York Times, shows the stark reality of the conditions in the city. )

For me, the anniversary also marks four years since my parents refused to evacuate New Orleans, despite the first-ever mandate to leave the city. “We are not leaving,” my mother said. “This is our home.” And for several days, my sister, brother and I didn’t know if they were dead or alive. We called FEMA, the Red Cross, the Louisiana State Police, the local hospital, begging for help. All the phones were out, circuits busy. We typed their names in Coast Guard search engines. In that first week after Katrina, none of us knew the scope of the damage or how many people were missing or dead. All we could do is watch the news—the roads in and out of New Orleans shut down, the floodwalls cracking open, the city filling like a bowl. In the end, my parents were safe—and this is less a miracle than random luck—though they remained in the city for three weeks after the storm. But so many other people on the Gulf Cost did not survive.

I am also wishing President Obama was in New Orleans. On Friday, the day before the anniversary, many citizens of New Orleans wrote and signed an open letter to the president, asking him to visit the city for this important fourth anniversary, and published this letter in the Times Picayune newspaper. The opening of the letter reads: “Tomorrow we will mark the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which claimed the lives of more than 1,400 Louisianans and nearly killed a great American city. We will miss having you in our midst.” This year, unlike other years, there are several organic commemorative events to mark the fourth anniversary of the storm. They include a ceremonial bell ringing at the Charity Hospital Cemetery at the time of the levee breaches and a festival celebrating the city with food and “entertainment” in Congo Square in Armstrong Park.

In my mind, I return to my experience on the first anniversary of Katrina, August 29, 2006. My parents did not want to participate in any commemorative events—I understand this, as the aftermath of the storm is their daily reality—but it was important to me to be part of the anniversary in any way I could. I went alone to an informal Second Line Parade downtown: a large group of us walked from the Convention Center to the Superdome. Those two sites were part of the worst of the aftermath of the storm, one the shelter that should have never been a shelter and one a shelter of last resort. The walk was a jazz funeral—familiar to me from my childhood. But the parade also brought together so many disparate communities: The Mardi Gras Indians, The Black Men’s Social Club from Treme, out-of-towners who had come down to New Orleans for the anniversary. It was not an orchestrated, rehearsed memorial. It didn’t follow the conventional narrative of disaster and the aftermath with invocation of heroes. But the parade invoked the spirit of New Orleans.

And it reminds me of the words of poet John Berryman in The Dreamsongs: “We are on each other’s hands/ who care.”

Nicole Cooley is the author of two books of poetry, with a third, Breach, forthcoming. She has received a Discovery/The Nation Award and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, CUNY.