The Great Global Book Swap

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.

Festival highlights: New European Fiction & War

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.

Our contributors elsewhere

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.”

Congrats to Colum

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.

Happy Bloomsday from Colum McCann

Mark Sarvas points to a lovely op-ed by Colum McCann, in which Colum describes reading Ulysses cover to cover for the first time, after “dipping into the novel for many years, reading the accessible parts, plundering the icing on the cake.” As he made his way through the novel, his grandfather, whom he barely knew, came alive in his mind as a contemporary of Leopold Bloom’s:

The man whom I had met only once was becoming flesh and blood through the pages of a fiction. After all, he had walked the very same streets of Dublin, on the same day as Leopold Bloom. I began to see my grandfather outside Dlugacz’s butcher shop, his hat cocked sideways, watching the moving “hams” of a young girl. I wondered if he had a penchant for “the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” I heard him arguing with the Citizen in Barney Kiernan’s pub. I felt him mourn the loss of a child.

This is something Colum has been pondering for a while; though he hadn’t read Ulysses straight through before, Leopold Bloom has long struck him, I think, as the sort of fictional character who seems more real to some of us than others who actually lived. As he said in a conversation we published in PEN America 8: Making Histories:

On June 16th, 1904, Leopold Bloom walked around Dublin. My great grandfather walked those same streets, but Leopold Bloom is much more real to me now than my great grandfather, whom I never met. Sometimes the characters we create are more real to us than the six and a half billion people in this world whom we haven’t yet met. Do you think that fiction writers might be the unacknowledged historians of the future?

Or, as he says in today’s op-ed: “Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.”

That need to “become the other” is something Colum discusses in his terrific conversation with Michael Ondaatje, which we published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself. And Colum’s own capacity for empathy is evident throughout his new novel, Let the Great World Spin, which we excerpted in that same issue, and which is eagerly anticipated by many (it comes out next week).

The excerpt we published is not online, but you can read the book’s opening chapter here -- and you can listen to Colum and others read from that opening here.

Notes after a busy week

More congratulations are in order: shortly after receiving the good news about Cynthia Ozick's essay, "Ghost Writers" -- published in PEN America 9: Checkpoints -- we were alerted that a short story from the same issue has won a Pushcart Prize. "Soap and Ambergris," by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed (the photo on the right is by Beowulf Sheehan), is a powerful piece of fiction -- and the Pushcart folks aren't the first to say so. It's adapted from Yousef's novel The Bottle, which has not yet been published in English -- and which, as The Washington Post reported in 2005, angered some fundamentalists in Yousef's native Saudi Arabia. You can read more about Yousef and other Saudi Arabian writers in this recent article from The National.

I met Yousef at last year's World Voices festival, and I'll have much more to say about the writers at World Voices 2009 in the coming weeks (and even months). For now, I'll simply note that the event celebrating our new issue was terrific -- with a good crowd, excellent readings (by Patricia Spears Jones, Paul LaFarge, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh), and lively conversation (among Jeffrey Lependorf, Colum McCann, Amitava Kumar, and Anya Ulinich). We'll have audio of the event eventually; for now, you can read a thoughtful write-up by Kristen O'Toole.

You can read many other festival write-ups, by the way, at PEN.org; at Words Without Borders; at the Complete Review; and elsewhere. And audio for several events is already available.

Lastly, on a more disappointing note, Wyatt Mason has written the last post for Sentences, his Harper's blog, where he recently made the case for close reading -- and also performed it beautifully (e.g., in a two-part discussion of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland -- which, as you may have heard, President Obama has been reading lately). It's sad to see Sentences go -- though if it leaves Mason more time to write about books elsewhere, that might be a tolerable trade.


Update: Patricia Cohen wrote a nice piece for today's New York Times about the Ken Saro-Wiwa tribute held Saturday as part of World Voices (and co-sponsored by Guernica). Audio from that event is available here. PEN America 2: Home and Away includes an excerpt from Ken Wiwa's book In the Shadow of a Saint, as well as an essay by Larry Siems about Ken's father entitled "Ken Saro-Wiwa: The High Price of Dissent."

Conversations @ World Voices

A late addition to the World Voices schedule: new Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio will talk with Adam Gopnik on April 24. (That's Le Clezio in the AP photo on the right, with his wife Marina in 1963.) Gopnik, who will also talk with Muriel Barbery on April 30, proved himself a deft interviewer last year when speaking with Umberto Eco -- the conversation between Eco and Gopnik is in our new issue.

One-on-one conversations between writers are among my favorite festival events -- and we’ve featured several of them in PEN America: George Saunders and Etgar Keret, Aleksandar Hemon and Rabih Alameddine, Elias Khoury and Nuruddin Farah. (Our next issue features a terrific conversation between Colum McCann and Michael Ondaatje.)

This year’s festival features several intriguing pairings, perhaps none more intriguing than Enrique Vila-Matas with Paul Auster:

For years Enrique Vila-Matas and Paul Auster have been engaged in an extended literary conversation, spanning continents and several languages. And in the ingenious short story by Eduardo Lago, which borrows its title, Brooklyn Trilogy, from Auster, the two are even brought together as fictional characters. Two years ago, they met in person for the first time and discovered that they do, indeed, share many common obsessions.

For more on Vila-Matas, the place to go on the web (besides his own website) is Conversational Reading.

Other conversations I’m particularly excited about: Richard Ford talking with Nam Le (if you haven’t read any of Nam’s work, read this); Adrian Tomine with Yoshihiro Tatsumi (a great Tatsumi story appears in PEN America 10); Mark Z. Danielewski with Rick Moody; and Péter Nádas with Daniel Mendelsohn (whose long essay on Susan Sontag’s journals I hope to read soon).

See also: Music @ World Voices


PS. Other interviews and one-on-one conversations to look forward to: Nawal El Sadaawi & Anthony Appiah; Meir Shalev & Daniel Menaker; Neil Gaiman & Caro Llewellyn; David Grossman & Philip Lopate; Domenico Starnone & Antonio Monda; Sebastian Barry & Roxanne Coady.

Our next issue, and other notes

Things have gotten busy here as we finish our tenth issue. It’s going to be full of great stuff, including:

A terrific piece of fiction adapted from Colum McCann’s upcoming novel about New York in the 1970s, Let the Great World Spin, which comes out in June (and which is highlighted by a Canongate editor in a rundown of exciting new books; via Conversational Reading). By the way, you can read another adapted portion of the novel in The Paris Review.

An excerpt from the funny, smart, and heartbreaking play “Autobiography of a Terrorist,” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, whose memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free comes out this month. Read a short interview with Saïd (via Maud Newton).

New fiction by Lydia Davis, Guillermo Fadanelli, Petina Gappah, Etgar Keret, and Hari Kunzru; conversations featuring Umberto Eco, Adam Gopnik, Michael Ondaatje, and Annie Proulx; and much, much more.

Meanwhile, have a look at this article in The National about Saudi Arabian fiction, in which PEN America contributor Yousef Al-Mohaimeed is discussed at some length (via the indispensable Literary Saloon).

And, lastly, watch the complete video of our benefit reading, now up at YouTube. All the readers are terrific, in my biased opinion, but I’ll make two recommendations in particular: Edward Albee and Sarah Ruhl reading from Theremin (12 minutes in), and Nathan Englander reading George Saunders (26 minutes in). Enjoy.

Prison Writing Benefit: Monday

As I mentioned last week, the Prison Writing Program is having its first-ever benefit reading this Monday at 8 pm at the Parsons School of Design on 5th Ave. between 11th & 12th Streets in Manhattan. There's been a slight change: Colum McCann cannot make it, so Francine Prose will be reading in his place, along with Breyten Breytenbach, Suheir Hammad, Susan Kuklin, Wesley Stace, and other special guests.

You can purchase tickets at www.pen.org/pwpgala, and you can RSVP on Facebook.

Since 1971, PEN's Prison Writing Program has sponsored an annual writing contest, published free handbooks 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.

By the way, two terrific pieces (one story and one poem) from the 2008 PEN Prison Writing Contest can be read in PEN America 9: Checkpoints.

Friday update: The poem published in Checkpoints will be read on Monday evening, and is now online here; I've also pasted it below. The author is Joe Rickey Knight, who is currently incarcerated at the Kentucky State Penitentiary.


An Escape Artist

At eight, I was a magician
able to slip from any confinement.
After my stepfather beat me
and imprisoned me in my bedroom,
I decided to disappear,
sneaking into the passageway
between the left brain and the right,
dropping through a trap door
and sliding down a chute
to the bottom of the cortex
where I searched a maze of memories
for a safe place to hide
and ended up at grandpa’s farm
where we flew kites all afternoon
on a hill behind the house.

And now, thirty-nine years later,
I slip out of my cell
here at the Kentucky State Pen
each time I write a poem.
Last week, I slipped out a window,
climbed down a rope, eluding guards,
then scaled the perimeter wall.
I wandered along the Cumberland riverbank,
happened upon an abandoned boat
and rode the currents to the Ohio,
Mississippi, and the Gulf, where I watched
a man hanging from a bright red canopy
above the rocking waters
parasail into the sky.

Launch party photos & video

Every fall, PEN holds a New Members/New Books Party at Housing Works celebrating the work of the past year with those who have recently joined PEN and members who've just published new books.

This year, that party also served as a formal lauch for PEN America 9: Checkpoints. Several of our contributors—including Colum McCann, Anya Ulinich, and Joshua Furst—were there, and another, Wayne Koestenbaum, said a few words about the new issue, highlighting the poem by Joe Ricky Knight and the FBI surveillance on Andy Warhol (these excellent pieces are not online: you’ll just have to order the magazine).

Someone from mediabistro was there with a video camera: watch Nick Trautwein talk about the all-editor jazz band and Joshua Henkin (author of Matrimony and frequent guest-blogger at The Elegant Variation) talk about the writing life. And the talented Beowulf Sheehan was snapping photos: on the left, PEN members survey the new books; above, Jonathan Burnham, publisher of HarperCollins, plays the keys, and author Will Heinrich chats with publicist Lisa Weinert and agent Melissa Flashman.

Prison Writing Benefit

Please join us at the first-ever benefit reading for PEN's 37-year-old Prison Writing Program. This is an enormously worthy cause: Since 1971, PEN's Prison Writing Program has sponsored an annual writing contest, published free handbooks 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.

Prison Writing Program: A Benefit Reading

When: Monday, October 20

Where: Kellen Auditorium, Parsons School of Design: 66 5th Ave., between 11th & 12th Streets

What time: 8 p.m.

With: Breyten Breytenbach, Colum McCann, Suheir Hammad, Susan Kuklin, Wesley Stace, and other special guests

Tickets are $50, and include post-event wine and reception.

>> Buy tickets now

All proceeds will go to PEN's Prison Writing Program.

David Grossman on Israel and Myth

PEN America 8 features a conversation about re-writing myth called “In the Beginning,” with David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Anne Provoost, and Jeanette Winterson, moderated by Colum McCann. Early on, Grossman (pictured left, in a portrait by Beowulf Sheehan) tells a wonderful story:

Many years ago, when I put my eldest son to bed, I told him, “This is the longest night of the year.” It was the 21st of December. At first light the next day he burst into our room, covered with sweat, and shouted, “Dad, Mom, it’s over! This night is over!” He was like Adam, the first man on Earth, wandering through an endless night, not knowing if the sun would rise again—and how relieved he must have been when the sun rose. The year after that, he told his younger brother, “This is going to be the longest night of the year”—and he said it with an air of indifference. He had found shelter in science and empirical experience. I could not help thinking of him as exiled from the primal, the more loaded feelings one has without this buffering shell, this armor of science and knowledge.

I am sure that my child will eventually look, as we are all looking, for this primal night, when we wandered alone. We look for it in legends, in stories, in myths.

Grossman told this story in April 2006. A few months later, the younger son in the story was killed in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, three days after Grossman—along with Amoz Oz and A.B. Yehosua—held a press conference calling for a cease-fire. Uri Grossman was in a tank struck by a Hezbollah missile.

Grossman spoke of his son’s death in his Freedom to Write Lecture, delivered one year after the conversation quoted above (both events were part of the World Voices festival). I thought of it again while reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s cover story in the current Atlantic Monthly, which divulges that Grossman has finished a novel “about an Israeli soldier, a tank commander, who goes to a big military operation,” and whose “mother has a kind of premonition that he’s going to be killed.” She refuses to “be at home when the army comes to announce the death of her son,” so she “starts a walk across Israel… and she tells the story of her son’s life.” Grossman started writing the novel just before Uri began his military service. According to Goldberg, the novel will be published in Israel this spring, and Goldberg believes it “could have a seismic effect on Israelis, who have, in their 60th year of independence, grown tired of losing their sons to war.”

(Also at The Atlantic, Goldberg interviews Barack Obama, who says that he can “remember reading The Yellow Wind [Grossman’s “exposé of the occupation and its demoralizing effects on Palestinians, and on the Israelis who enforced it”] when it came out,” and that his “intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Whether it was theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris.”)

Fact, fiction, and things in between

The latest round of fake memoirs-- and the seemingly overheated attacks on Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone-- have engendered numerous articles and discussions about fact, fiction, poetic license, and the rest of it. (My favorite take on the subject is Luc Sante's.)

As William Maxwell wrote, "in talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw." That line (from So Long, See You Tomorrow) opens PEN America 8: Making Histories, thanks to Colum McCann. He moderated a conversation with Arthur Japin, Laila Lalami, Imma Monsó, and Michael Wallner, which is the first piece in the new issue (and which we've put online).

Even more on point, perhaps, is the piece that follows: "How She Penetrates," by Maggie Nelson. The series of poems is from Jane: A Murder, the book that Nelson wrote after becoming consumed by the unsolved murder of her aunt Jane (which took place in Michigan in 1969). In the poem "Figment," Nelson, using a dictionary, traces the seeming decline in our respect for the imagination.

When I tell my grandfather
I am writing about Jane, he says,

What will it be, a figment
of your imagination?

We are eating awful little pizzas
and my mother is into

the boxed wine. I don’t know
what to say. I wish

I could show him: between
figling (a little fig)

and figure lies
figment, from fingere, meaning

to form. As used in 1592:
The excellencie, dilicatnes, and perfection of this figment
cannot be suffi[ci]entlie expressed.

But he doesn’t want to see.
Besides, that meaning

is obsolete. By 1639:
It is a sin to lie, even in God’s cause, and to defend his justice

with false tales and figments.
And by 1875:

We must not conceive that this logical figment
ever had a real existence.

If only all these memoir-fabulists had thought so deeply about fact, fiction, memory, and form. But best-sellerdom beckoned, I suppose.

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.