Our contributors elsewhere

James Wood -- whose essay “Virginia Woolf’s Forgetful Selves,” appeared in our first issue -- reviews Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel Censoring an Iranian Love Story in this week’s New Yorker. Mandanipour’s book, which has not been published in Iran, is, in Wood’s words,

not simply prohibited by censorship but made by it. For Mandanipour, the censor is a kind of co-writer of the book, and he appears often in this novel, under the alias of Porfiry Petrovich (the detective who chases Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov). We see him squabbling with Mandanipour, chatting to another Iranian writer, plotting alternative stories for Dara and Sara, striking out offensive phrases, and finally falling in love with Sara.

Mandanipour hinted at the story of Dara and Sara in a talk, “The Life of a Word,” published in PEN America 8: Making Histories.

Petina Gappah, whose story “Rosie’s Bridegroom” appears in our latest issue, also has a story in issue 8 of A Public Space, entitled “The Mupandawana Dancing Champion.” Both stories are available online. You should also check out Petina’s blog.

Jeremy Schmall, whose poem “The Functioning Synapse Papered Over” appears in our latest issue, has written an essay about poetry and capitalism for HTML Giant.

Finally, Toni Morrison talks about free expression and the essay collection Burn This Book, which she edited, and which was published by HarperStudio in conjunction with PEN American Center.

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.)

Virginia Woolf: four thoughts and one tattoo

Angelina Jolie allegedly has this remark from Virginia Woolf tattooed on her body: "As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country." This leads Scott Esposito to ruminate about "how American authors have dealt with the concept of national guilt."

It led me back to the Woolf tributes in PEN America 1: Classics, by James Wood, Mary Gordon, Elaine Showalter, and Michael Cunningham, which themselves contain some interesting ideas:

James Wood: "Woolf turns female absent-mindedness into the most searching philosophy of the self, and we suffer with her heroines, who are suspended between forgetfulness and remembrance, between their fulfillment and their irrelevance."

Mary Gordon: Woolf's "ideal is a fiction in which the stuff of realistic fiction—money, class, social placement, the details of family connection—is notable for its absence, and attention is paid only to that which reveals the inner life."

Elaine Showalter: "As an American, I’m always struck by how much importance Woolf placed on the story of Shakespeare’s sister, and on the coming of the great female literary messiah. Americans have not been so reverent, at least not American men."

Michael Cunningham (who says he read Woolf to impress a girl, and that "Mrs. Dalloway was the first great novel I ever read"): "If you look with sufficient penetration, and sufficient art, at any hour in the life of anybody, you can crack it open. And get everything."

Also included in that issue is a long piece from Woolf's own Common Reader: Second Series, called "How Should One Read a Book?"

PS. That's Woolf on the left, circa 1912 (when she was Virginia Stephen).

PPS. The most striking fictional exploration of guilt and recent American crimes that I've read is this book (which also happens to have the best website I have maybe ever seen for a novel).

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.

"Prose fiction was born Protestant."

Not long ago while leaving a restaurant in Brooklyn, I walked into a strange and holy ritual. A red-haired priest in black suit and white clerical collar was out on the sidewalk blessing an iguana. Scales iridescent in the sun, the reptile looked like a small dragon. People gathered around and the sacrament had the undeniable air of divinity. After the priest made the sign of the cross over the lizard, he moved into the restaurant surrounded by true believers urging him to bless their son, their baby, their little yappy dog.

So begins Darcy Steinke's excellent review of Mary Gordon's new memoir, Circling My Mother, in the most recent New York Times Book Review. Steinke is herself the author of a memoir about a religious upbringing-- though Lutheran rather than Catholic. Steinke does not dwell on (or even mention) that religious difference-- which perhaps would have been out of place in a book review. But it would be interesting to hear her thoughts on the matter. Gordon herself had some fascinating things to say about it in a tribute to Flannery O'Connor (the author rendered above) titled "Bad Behavior" and published in our second issue:

Whatever beliefs she professed as an orthodox Catholic, her fiction suggests that not only is human fate mysterious, human behavior is as well, and for this reason all notions of reward and punishment are entirely beside the point for her. This, I believe, separates her from Protestant Fundamentalists. Her characters may be deeply moved by the fear of hellfire but she is interested in hellfire only as it interests them. Even the terms of reward and punishment are difficult to discern in her fiction. Many of her characters have soul-expanding experiences that end in death. Are the characters, then, said to be rewarded or punished? Is Nelson, the fat dull child of the do-gooder social worker father, who is cloaked in a noble mourning invisible to his father, rewarded or punished in “The Lame Shall Enter First” by the death he achieves when he tries to join his dead mother among the stars, urged by the wily Satanic crippled boy who will not take Nelson’s father’s good intentions for what they are? Mrs. May in “Greenleaf” is gored by a bull: is this her comeuppance or a rapture of ecstasy? Julian’s mother in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is smacked in the face by the pocketbook of a furious black woman wearing a hat identical to hers: she meets her end, but is it a punishment for racist condescension or the corridor to paradise?

Gordon goes on to say that the "very unanswerability of these questions, and the fact that the characters’ fates are random, disproportionate, and surprising, puts them smack in the corral of mystery and outside the territory of motivation"-- which, she says, is precisely how O'Connor wanted it.

Gordon's tribute begins with the provocative remark that serves as the title of this post, and contains several insights into a writer who has gotten so far into Gordon's psyche as to actually appear in her dreams:

I dreamed that Flannery O’Connor and I were speaking together on a panel. Her hair was perfectly coifed; she was wearing a perfectly tailored suit, and a perfectly crisp white blouse, and perfectly shined penny loafers. My hair was filthy, my slip was showing, my stockings were ripped. In the dream she said to me, “Your problem is that you don’t believe in perfection.” And I said to her, because it was my dream, “I do believe in perfection, but you think perfection is flawlessness, and I think it’s completeness.” Well, that just shows how she can scare a Catholic girl, because we do think of her as a Catholic writer.

Read the rest. And for more of Gordon's thoughts on her literary forebears, see her essay about Virginia Woolf in our first issue.

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.