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

* 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.”

This week's events: Beyond Margins

Don't forget about this week's events, starting tonight at 7 with "The Present Past: Celebrating Writers of Color," the 2008 Beyond Margins Award Ceremony, and continuing tomorrow with "Beyond Margins: The Critical Perspective," co-presented by PEN and the NBCC.

You can also now read work by this year's winners (Chris Abani, Amiri Baraka, Frances Hwang, Joseph Marshall III, and Naeem Murr) over at PEN.org.

Update: Tomorrow's event, which is at Housing Works, also begins at 7 pm, and should last about an hour. So there will be plenty of time to get home for the last presidential debate.

Notes on a Wednesday

After discovering that Barack Obama is a fan of Philip Roth (and David Grossman), Jeffrey Goldberg asked readers for "a couple of paragraphs describing what a Philip Roth-influenced Obama White House would look like." And he's picked a couple of winners.

Rumbles have been brewing in the usually peaceful worlds of literary magazines and literary translation. I'm looking forward to the "mini-manifesto" from VQR editor Ted Genoways.

I'm also looking forward to Franzen's answer.

Our editor, M Mark, is headed to Jamaica this week to participate in the Calabash Literary Festival, which aims to "transform the literary arts in the Caribbean." She'll be joining PEN America 8 contributor Chris Abani, among other great authors, and will be featured on a panel about editing collections.

And the PEN Literary Awards ceremony was a treat. PEN.org should have audio soon. (Photo below by Beowulf Sheehan; that's Jonathan Ames among the winners.)

How Chinua Achebe is like Barack Obama

At Tuesday evening's sold-out tribute to Chinua Achebe, celebrating the 50th birthday of Things Fall Apart, Edwige Danticat (pictured left, afterwards, with Ha Jin) began by explaining why she liked Achebe before she'd ever read his books. "I loved his name," she said. "He seemed like family-- he has a strange name, too. Now I say that," she added, "about Barack Obama." (Big round of applause.)

Chimamanda Adichie also spoke of seeing herself in Achebe and his work. Her first stories, she said, which she wrote when she a small girl, were about "English children with blue eyes who ate apples, played in the snow, and had dogs named Socks." She hadn't learned, she said, that "people like me could exist in books." Achebe taught her that.

Chris Abani was drawn to Achebe for a different reason: to pick up girls. His older brother's "shtick for getting girls," he said, was to quote Achebe. And so Abani, looking for tips, read Things Fall Apart-- the first book he had read by an African writer, after spending his youth devouring everything from "The Silver Surfer to Dostoevsky."

Colum McCann read the Yeats poem "The Second Coming," from which Achebe got his title; Suheir Hammad performed one of her own poems; Ha Jin spoke about being a "migrant writer in the English language," and said that Achebe worked to "extend the frontier" of English through his "mastery of the language." Toni Morrison read some of Achebe's words on that subject-- out of an anthology she put together in the late '60s for high school classrooms (which, she noted ruefully, made it into very few classrooms).

Finally, Achebe himself took the stage, after an introduction from Leon Bottstein. He said that Things Fall Apart "wrote me," and then told an amazing story about sending his manuscript of the novel-- the only one he had!-- to England so that it could be professionally typed. He only got it back with the help of an English woman he knew in Nigeria. When asked what he would have done if it had been lost, he said, with dry, dark humor, "Probably the same thing that Okonkwo did."

Other reports on the evening here, here, and here.

PS. Remko Caprio raises some challenging points in the comments (scroll down), and has the most thorough overview of the evening I've seen over at his own site.

Things Fall Apart, fifty years later

Mark Sarvas points to this excellent article about Chinua Achebe and his landmark novel, Things Fall Apart, which recently turned fifty. The article discusses, among other things, the influence of the novel on writers who came after Achebe:

One of the most celebrated young Nigerian writers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, says that she read Things Fall Apart when she was around 8 and has periodically reread it. "I find that I liked the same things each time - the familiarity with it. I hadn't realized that people like me could be in a book," she explains.

Countless others have cited Achebe, from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who once called "Things Fall Apart," a "major education" for me, to Ha Jin, a Chinese-American novelist. Achebe himself recalls some letters he received about a decade ago from students at a women's college in South Korea.

As it happens, all three of these writers-- Adichie, Toni Morrison, and Ha Jin-- will be at the PEN tribute to Achebe taking place a week from today at Town Hall in New York. They'll be joined by Chris Abani, Michael Cunningham, Edwidge Danticat, Suheir Hammad, and Colum McCann. The evening will also feature a special performance by the Francesca Harper Dance Project with dancers from the Alvin Ailey School. And there are still a few tickets available.