New fiction for the long weekend

The new issue of Granta is a "New Fiction Special," with work by Paul Auster, Amy Bloom, Ha Jin, and many more. Ha Jin's story, "In the Crossfire," is available online. (You can read Ha Jin's tribute to Chinua Achebe in PEN America 8: Making Histories; Paul Auster's tribute to Samuel Beckett in PEN America 5: Silences; and Amy Bloom's tribute to Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen right here on the blog.)

The issue includes a short, untitled piece by Chris Ware -- whose work is also in the new Bookforum, illustrating fiction by Holly Goddard Jones. (And for some animation by Ware, stop by VQR's blog.) Bookforum's new issue includes five other works of fiction, all with illustrations by noted graphic novelists; I'm particularly interested in this excerpt from The Cave Man by Xiaoda Xiao, "a survivor of seven years of forced labor on an island in Taihu Lake in Jiangsu province, where he served in one of Mao’s infamous prison labor-reform brigades." The illustration on the left (click to enlarge), which nods to Yeats, is by Lauren Weinstein, and accompanies fiction by Terrence Holt, introduced by Junot Díaz.

Bookforum also has an interview with Aleksandar Hemon, whose conversation with Rabih Alameddine is in PEN America 9: Checkpoints.

Lastly, the "Spring Books" issue of The Nation is out; among the many essays and reviews is this one on José Manuel Prieto's Rex, written by recent PEN honoree Natasha Wimmer. (And speaking of PEN's recent honorees, here are some highlights from speeches at Tuesday's awards ceremony.) Prieto's tribute to Gabriel García Márquez ran in PEN America 6: Metamorphoses.

Weekend notes

English PEN is creating an Online World Atlas that will, eventually, tell you “everything you need to know about the world’s great writers and emerging voices.” Here’s the thing: “All the content is added by you: readers and writers who want to pass on your tips and create a new global community of readers.” It’s a work in progress, so, if you’re interested, go help out.

Triboro Pictures is producing a movie, The Fragile Mistress, based on Leora Skolkin-Smith’s novel Edges, which was edited and published by the late Grace Paley. They’ve gotten permission to shoot the movie in Jordan and Israel, and now just need to raise the money...

FENCE is emulating Radiohead: Donate any amount between now and the end of April and get a subscription to the excellent magazine for one year.

Amitava Kumar posted a lovely write-up of the Philip Roth birthday tribute:

All this while, the panelists were aware that the man himself was sitting in the front row, looking at them, the fingers of each hand lightly pressed against the other in front of his mouth. He was like a judge watching the lawyers presenting their case, all the young men appearing to be in agreement with each other on the court floor.

You can also listen to the event.

Lastly, Bill Johnston won a much-deserved award from the Polish Cultural Institute for his terrific translation of New Poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz, published by the excellent Archipelago Books. One of my favorite poems from the collection appears in PEN America 8: Making Histories (which you can order here); it’s called “Regression in die Ursuppe” (that last word is German for something like “primordial soup”). Here’s how it begins:

in the beginning was a thick
soup which under the influence
of light (and heat)

produced life

from the soup emerged a creature
or rather something
that transformed itself into yeast
into a chimpanzee
eventually god came along
and created humans
man and woman
sun cat and tick

humans invented the wheel
wrote Faust

and began printing
paper money....

PS. The photos above were submitted by Boria Sax and Susan Shapiro for the mixed media project mentioned below. And don't forget to check out the online confessional, too...

Guest Post: Amy Bloom on Tillie and Grace

Ever since its first issue, which included tributes to Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, and Jorge Luis Borges, PEN America has paid homage to the great writers of the 20th century, publishing essays and talks about them by some of the great writers of our own day. Extending that tradition to our blog, we're excited to share this tribute by Amy Bloom, author of the critically-acclaimed and best-selling Away, among other books, to two writers who left us this year: Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley. As Bloom notes, both were not only groundbreaking short story writers, but devoted political activists who embodied the mission of PEN.


Az mir leben, muz mir tuun.

As long as we live, we must do the work.


To lose Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley in one year is a bad year, even if a lot of people didn't know it at the time, Tillie Olsen would have said, and she would have been right. To have had them both for so long was a privilege, even if a lot of people didn't know it, Grace Paley would have said. And she would have been right.

If there were ever two people, and not coincidentally at all, two women, who epitomized PEN's goals: advancing literature, defending free speech and fostering connections betweens writers everywhere, Tillie and Grace were it.

I knew Grace Paley, for about seven short years, but I only knew Tillie Olsen by her work and by her life. I knew Tillie Olsen's husband lost his job for his labor organizing work and I had read that Tillie herself was accused of being a Stalinist working to infiltrate the city's school's through the PTA (and she had been a Young Communist and for all I know she was a Stalinist, but I do like the image of Grace and Tillie together as they never were, Nebraska and the Bronx, happy to be out of jail for civil disobedience, happy to be back with their kids, unpacking sandwiches on the playground benches, chatting up a couple of other young mothers and bringing about the Revolution. They did try.)

They were both revolutionary writers, writers who told the stories not only about people no one had seen on the page, but in language no one had constructed before. And they were both women who lived their lives in accordance with their political principles and built their lives, as best they could, around the people they loved: Grace and her Bob and her son and daughter and her beloved grandchildren, Tillie and her handsome Jack, her four daughters and eight grandchildren. And so, they didn't have quite as much time to write as some other people. And they didn't have such large advances. And you never saw their names in glossy magazines, or in a fashion ad, modeling turtlenecks, or writing fiction to promote a new martini. They wrote about the hard lives of working class women: hotel maids, secretaries, salesgirls; and they wrote about all of the world's outsiders; and they wrote about human rights and the obligations of fairness and decency; and they both wrote with language that came from the mouths of real people who struggled; and they wrote durable, innovative, poetic and celebratory sentences, both of them. And as much as Ray Carver and Norman Mailer shaped American fiction and were known for it, Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley shaped the American short story, as if they were God and it was clay, and however much or little known they were for much of their writing lives, the short story itself is now different than it was, because of them, and we know better how we should live and write, because of them.

-- Amy Bloom

Amy Bloom, a member of PEN American Center, has published two novels, two story collections, and a non-fiction book on gender (Normal). The recipient of a National Magazine Award, she has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications. She is a practicing psychotherapist and teaches at Yale University.

A Tribute to Grace Paley

Last night, PEN American Center held a beautiful tribute to long-time member Grace Paley in the nearly-full Great Hall at Cooper Union.

The evening began with remarks by current PEN president Francine Prose, who was blown away by Grace’s stories in college, and later was a colleague of hers at Sarah Lawrence. Prose hated the job. But while walking with Grace across campus, she saw that the “sullen brats” she was teaching became the “radiant children that they were” in Grace’s presence.

One of Grace’s own children, Nora Paley, spoke next. Noting the illness of her mother’s last years, she said that Grace’s “interest in the world did not diminish with her red blood cells.” Happiness, she said, was her mother’s “default position.”

Victoria Redel recalled a reading late in Grace’s life, which Grace began by saying how wonderful it was to be there with so many of her friends—“and two of my enemies.” (“Grace, you old showgirl,” Redel thought at the time.) Scott Spencer read her first published story, “Goodbye and Good Luck,” about a young Russian-American woman who takes a job at a Russian theater on 2^nd Avenue. Richard Price read “The Burdened Man.” There were murmurs of recognition when Gerry Albarelli read Grace’s poem, “The Hard-Hearted Rich.” (Grace, Albarelli said, taught him “that history takes a long time to make up its mind.”)

Sonia Sanchez said that Grace’s life was about “what it means to be human,” a line she repeated—and even sang a little. Grace called her, she said, after Sanchez's last arrest, which followed a visit to an army recruiting center. (“Take us,” Sanchez and her fellow activists told the recruiters, “not our sons and daughers and grandchildren.” When a reporter from NPR asked her what she would do if the army actually accepted her, Sanchez said she would go to the training camp and do her push-ups—“push-ups for peace.”)

Michael Cunningham spoke about Grace’s literary voice—as indelible, he said, as Austen’s or Faulkner’s. She was the “master,” he explained, “of the plain-but-not-plain sentence.” He read the wonderful and hilarious story, “The Loudest Voice.” Walter Mosley said that Grace was one of our greatest short story writers, along with Isaac Babel and Flannery O’Connor and a few others. She had a “bluntness” that he saw in her personal manner as well as her work, naming the things she saw flatly as she saw them.

Katha Pollitt read from the amazing essay “Six Days, Some Rememberings” (which appears in PEN America 5: Silences) about the time Grace spent in a women’s prison in Greenwich Village. (The threat of jail became familiar to the devoted political activist.) Eve Ensler read “Midrash on Happiness,” in which a woman defines happiness—and several subsequent terms—in dialogue with a friend: “By silence she meant refusal to speak; by stupidity she meant refusal to listen.”

Ensler saw Grace as a voice of “the corner,” out on the block, “telling stories.” “Now we have blogs instead of blocks,” she lamented, inviting—urging—everyone to “meet me at the corner,” where “we’ll gather,” she said, “until the world finally changes.”

To close the evening, Vera Williams spoke about her friend, that “beloved busybody,” and read “The Unity Statement,” which Grace wrote along with the other members of the Women’s Pentagon Action. They took the statement with them to Washington in 1980. The Great Hall became nearly silent as Williams read: “We understand all is connectedness.” “We will not allow these violent games to continue.” As she continued, the reading was punctuated by calls of “Amen!” and “Here here!” When she finished, there was shouting, and many people stood to applaud.

More November Events: Grace Paley Tribute & Periodically Speaking

A few weeks ago I mentioned the upcoming events at Southpaw in Brooklyn: Noah and Jonathan Baumbach with Amanda Stern on the 11th; Sufjan Stevens and Wesley Stace, aka John Wesley Harding, with Rick Moody on the 28th.

Here are two more November events of note, on the first and second Tuesdays of the month (that's the 6th and the 13th):

A Tribute to Grace Paley: An Evening of Readings and Remembrance

When: Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Where: The Great Hall of Cooper Union: Cooper Square, New York City
What time: 7 p.m.

Participants include: Michael Cunningham, Eve Ensler, Amy Hempel, Walter Mosley, Richard Price, Katha Pollitt, Francine Prose, Victoria Redel, Scott Spencer, Sonia Sanchez, Vera B. Williams

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Periocially Speaking: Editors Introduce Emerging Writers

When: Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Where: DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room, The New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd
What time: 7 p.m.

A reading series put together by CLMP and the NYPL. Editor David Hamilton (Iowa Review) introduces fiction writer Stellar Kim; Editor Robert Arnold (Memorious) introduces poet Beth Woodcome; and Editor M Mark (PEN America) introduces nonfiction writer Sarah Messer.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

For more information on these two events, go here and here, respectively.

"The Open Destiny of Life"

Garth Risk Hallberg, in his tribute to Grace Paley, highlights a wonderful line from her story “A Conversation with My Father”: “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” In the story, a writer is arguing with her father about fiction. He says, “You don't want to recognize it, Tragedy! Plain tragedy! Historical tragedy!” She says, speaking of a character she’s invented, “She could change.”

That remark about “the open destiny of life” stuck with Ann Charters as well—she mentioned it in a conversation with Grace Paley that we published in 2002, using that line for its title. (A longer version appears in The Story and Its Writer.) The conversation highlights Paley’s remarkable generosity and humility, even as regards her own work. Asked about her influences, Paley says she feels she was “influenced by everybody.” As for which of those influences really show up in her own work, she insists: “That’s for the reader to say.” Charters suggests that perhaps the narrator of “A Conversation with My Father” is refusing to face her father’s imminent death, and that may be a theme of the story. Paley doesn’t see it that way, she says—then adds: “Maybe the reader of a particular story knows better than the writer what it means.” (Perhaps it’s no surprise that she was even gracious to tongue-tied fans.)

Paley is especially eloquent when describing her different relationships to poetry and to short stories:

I can give you a definition that can be proven wrong in many ways, but for me it was that in writing poetry I wanted to talk to the world, I wanted to address the world, so to speak. But writing stories, I wanted to get the world to explain itself to me, to speak to me. And for me that was the essential difference between writing poetry and stories, and it still is, in many ways. So I had to get that world to talk to me. I had to reach out to it, a very different thing than writing poems. I had to reach out to the world and get it to tell me what it was all about, because I didn’t understand it. I just didn’t understand. Also, I’d always been very interested in people and told funny stories, and I didn’t have any room for doing that in poems, again because of my own self. My poems were too literary; that’s the real reason.

Paley was a member of PEN for more than forty years, served twenty-one years on the PEN board, and was also on the Advisory Board of PEN America. Francine Prose has written a tribute to her on the PEN website, and PEN's web editors have created an online forum for readers “to share thoughts, words, and memories in honor of Grace Paley.” Her devoted political activism is the subject of this interview, which contains a line almost as wonderful as her remark about the “open destiny of life”: “We always tried to say something illegal.”