Benefit recap

Last night, a varied lineup of terrific writers celebrated the journal and helped us raise money to keep it going. The benefit was recorded, and I’ll link to the audio here after it becomes available. In the meantime, here’s a short recap.

After an introduction from M Mark, the journal’s editor, Francine Prose and Lydia Davis began the evening by reading translated pieces from PEN America 6: Metamorphoses: Prose read “Canned Foreign,” by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky, and Lydia Davis read “Borges and I,” by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James Irby. Both Prose and Davis are terrific readers, and they each captured the sly intelligence and wit of their respective readings.

They were followed by Edward Albee and Sarah Ruhl, who together read a comic scene from Petr Zelenka’s play Theremin that was published in PEN America 8: Making Histories. Albee introduced Ruhl as a “fine American dramatist,” then added, “I also write plays,” before launching into his spirited interpretation of Léon Sergeivich Theremin.

Albee and Ruhl were followed by Ron Chernow, who commented briefly on the PEN Prison Writing Program before reading a lyrical excerpt from “Hook Island Traveler,” by Chris Everley, which is in our most recent issue.

Nathan Englander and Deborah Eisenberg came out together -- in symbolic honor of PEN’s commitment to fostering literary fellowhip -- and read pieces by George Saunders (“Realist Fiction”) and Etgar Keret (“Rachamim and the Worm Man (An Evil Story),” which will be in issue #10), two smart and funny writers whose conversation with each other was published in Making Histories.

To close the evening, André Aciman read from “Baghdad, Damascus, Atlanta,” an essay by Ahmed Ali, and Anthony Appiah read two poems by Fady Joudah before thanking everyone for coming and making an eloquent argument for the importance of PEN’s mission and the journal’s role in forwarding it.Great thanks to all the readers and everyone who joined us.

Small Press Book Fair and more

This Saturday and Sunday is the Small Press Book Fair in NYC at the lovely General Society building on West 44th Street. It closes with the “Literary Trivia Smackdown 2.0,” on Sunday at 4 pm, which was supposed to feature folks from the New York Review of Books, but, due to a scheduling conflict, will instead send staffers from a certain literary and human rights organization up against a fearsome group of literary bloggers: Levi Asher, Sarah Weinman, Ed Champion, and Eric Rosenfield. Come cheer us on against these daunting foes. Should be fun—especially since the gauntlet has already been thrown.

“Gabriel Garcia Marquez from Colombia, Toni Morrison from the United States and Seamus Heaney from Ireland offered their support for the Aura Estrada Prize in memory of a Mexican writer who died in 2007 at age 30.” The prize was established by Aura’s husband, Francisco Goldman. (Via the Literary Saloon.)

Obama’s literary name-dropping grows ever more impressive. If you, too, must prepare for a meeting with Argentine President Cristina Fernandez, you can brush up on Borges and Cortázar by reading PEN America 4: Fact/Fiction, which features writing by both men, as well as PEN America 1: Classics, which features Paul Auster, Robert Stone, and others offering their thoughts on Borges. (Via A Different Stripe.)

“The Curious Mind of Jeffrey Eugenides,” via The Millions. Eugenides talks to Daniel Kehlmann in our latest issue, which also features a witty piece from Kehlmann’s first novel, just published in English this month. And Eugenides reads Robert Walser in PEN's Year in Review, which also includes fiction by Etgar Keret and Horacio Castellanos Moya, poetry by Fady Joudah and Mahmoud Darwish, and much more.

(Photo of Borges by Diane Arbus.)

Reading for the long weekend

Paper Cuts has posted a timely passage from Richard Ford's second Frank Bascombe novel, Independence Day:

Best maybe just to pass the day as the original signers did and as I prefer to do, in a country-like setting near to home, alone with your thoughts, your fears, your hopes, your “moments of reason” for what new world lies fearsomely ahead.

And if you are fortunate enough to be "in a country-like setting near to home, alone with your thoughts," here are some reading suggestions, courtesy of two of the best critics around, Albert Mobilio of Bookforum and Geoffrey O'Brien of The Library of America (a great conversation between the two of whom was published in the second issue of PEN America). Both have made especially thoughtful contributions to the "Critical Library" series that runs on the NBCC blog: O'Brien's list is decidedly international, and kicks off with the Collected Works of Borges; Mobilio's has a few of my own favorites, including Kill All Your Darlings by Luc Sante.

And as a postscript to the Paper Cuts post, here's an old interview with Ford in which he acknowledges the influence of one of Bruce Springsteen's better songs on his novel:

I was very attracted to Bruce Springsteen's song "Independence Day," in which a son sings a kind of lament to his father, especially the line, "Just say goodbye, it's Independence Day." I hadn't ever realized that independence in the most conventional sense means leavetaking, putting distance between yourself and other people, getting out of their orbit.

Happy reading.

Prison writing

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

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

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

Also:

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

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

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

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

A few Friday notes

Some matters of interest as we finish correcting the proofs on our next issue:

* A newly translated interview with Borges:

My father showed me his library, which seemed to me infinite, and he told me to read whatever I wanted, but that if something bored me I should put it down immediately, that is, the opposite of obligatory reading.

Tributes to Borges from Paul Auster and others can be found in PEN America 1: Classics.

* One of Lydia Davis's stories, provided in full by Amitava Kumar:

Happiest Moment

If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

Davis paid tribute to Proust (whom she has translated) in PEN America 2: Home & Away

Lastly, Open Letter continues to keep track of all the works of literary translation being published in the US this year. First up this time out: The Executor: A Comedy of Letters, by Michael Krüger, "about a literary executor who has to go through the papers of the recently deceased Rudolf, a scam of an academic who, nevertheless, leaves behind a unpublished masterpiece that will change the future of literature." This is the second of Krüger's novels to appear in English; Andrew Shields was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize for translating The Cello Player, which was the first.

Robert Stone, Jorge Luis Borges, and... Parade Magazine?

Robert Stone turns 70 today, as Dwight Garner has noted over at Paper Cuts. Seven years ago, Stone spoke at a PEN tribute to Jorge Luis Borges-- who, as it happens, was born 108 years ago this Friday-- and his words were published in the inaugural issue of PEN America. Borges does not immediately come to mind as an influence for the author of A Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers, but Stone found him “tremendously liberating and inspiring.” In his tribute, he cites a passage from A Universal History of Iniquity that one can imagine Stone reading during his travels with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters:

The Mississippi is a broad-chested river, a dark and infinite brother of the Parani, the Uruguay, the Amazon, and the Orinoco. It is a river of mulatto-hued water; more than four hundred million tons of mud, carried by that water, insult the Gulf of Mexico each year. All that venerable and ancient waste has created a delta where gigantic swamp cypresses grow from the slough of a continent in perpetual dissolution and where labyrinths of clay, dead fish, and swamp reeds push out the borders and extend the peace of their fetid empire. Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their bottomlands, too, populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race, prone to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water.

Stone later taught a fiction course that "included an examination of Borges's work." As the semester was approaching, he had a distinctly "Borgesian" experience:

Just before the course began, for unfathomable Borgesian reasons, an article appeared in Parade magazine, the popular Sunday supplement. It was a short history of the western outlaw Sam Bess by Jorge Luis Borges, and my students, who did not look to Parade for exemplars in contemporary prose, were puzzled.

Those students could have talked to Eliot Weinberger, who also spoke at the Borges tribute. He would have explained that "Borges was an immensely prolific writer" who wrote "something like twelve hundred pieces of nonfiction," on everything from "Hollywood movies to detective stories to sci-fi," not to mention "tango lyrics and the inscriptions painted on horse-drawn carts in Buenos Aires." Weinberger, who edited the Selected Non-Fictions of Borges in English (and "could easily," he says, "do a few more books of equal size"), also notes that "Borges worked, amazingly, for El Hogar, the Argentine equivalent of Ladies’ Home Journal." So perhaps an appearance in Parade is not so puzzling.

But back to Robert Stone: Did you know that he was first given On the Road by his mother? He recounted the experience ten years ago in The New York Times. With all the Kerouac celebrations going around, it's fascinating to see him throwing cold water on the plaudits: "People once said that Jack Kerouac's name would be remembered when those of his contemporaries are forgotten. They may well be right, and for filial and patriotic reasons I say let it be so. But, on the whole, I think On the Road was more Mom's kind of book than mine."

For those of us who failed to read Prime Green back in January, now seems like a good time to pick it up. Happy Birthday, Mr. Stone.