Our contributors elsewhere

Cynthia Ozick’s essay “Ghost Writers,” which was published in PEN America 9: Checkpoints, is in the new edition of Best American Essays.

José Rubén Zamora’s description of a raid on his house by the Guatemalan military, published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, is in the new issue of The Utne Reader.

Over at The Reading Experience, Daniel Green is disappointed by the new Tin House anthology, but praises the contribution of Lucy Corin (“the only essay in this book that makes it worth having”), whose “Seven Small Apocalypses” ran in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

Lynne Tillman, whose contribution to our forum on “make believe” has just gone online, is interviewed at The Millions.

Rabih Alameddine, whose contribution to our forum on “make believe” I mentioned on Monday, writes about The Twilight Zone, V.S. Naipaul, and creativity for The Rumpus.

On November 9, Mary Gaitskill—who contributed to the forum in PEN America 3: Tribes—will join Eric Bogosian, John Turturro, and others at the second annual benefit reading for the PEN Prison Writing Program. As an installment of WNYC’s signature series “The NEXT New York Conversation,” this event will be broadcast and live-streamed, allowing incarcerated men and women with radio and/or internet access to listen to the event and join our audience. More details here.

And there’s a free PEN event tomorrow: Salman Rushdie—who paid tribute to Ryszard Kapuściński in PEN America 8: Making Histories—will join Keith Gessen, Tanya Lokshina, and others in honoring Natalia Estemirova—the award-winning human rights activist and journalist murdered on July 15, 2009—and discussing the state of dissent and press freedom in Russia. Full details below.

Bearing Witness in Chechnya: The Legacy of Natalia Estemirova

When: Thursday, October 29
Where: Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate School, 365 Fifth Ave., NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

With Salman Rushdie, Michael Arena, Ann Cooper, Keith Gessen, Tanya Lokshina, and Elena Milashina.

Free and open to the public

Notes before a busy week

Congratulations to Cynthia Ozick, whose essay "Ghost Writers," published in PEN America 9: Checkpoints, has been selected by Mary Oliver for the next edition of Best American Essays. "Ghost Writers" is based on Cynthia's "no-holds barred great speech" accepting the PEN/Nabokov Award. Here's how the essay begins:

Writers are hidden beings; you have never actually met one. If you should ever believe you are seeing a writer, or having an argument with a writer, or going to lunch with a writer, or listening to a talk by a writer, then you can be sure it is all a mistake.

Of course, we at PEN are hoping many such mistakes will be made this week during the World Voices festival, which begins in earnest tomorrow. If the past is any guide, there will be a lot of online coverage, but here's a good place to start: PEN's own World Voices Blogs. Among the PEN bloggers this year are Jane Ciabattari and Mary Ann Caws (editor of the book Manifesto: A Century of Isms, selections from which appeared in our third issue, Tribes.)

Scott Esposito notices an upcoming book by past World Voices participant Shahriar Mandanipour: Censoring an Iranian Love Story (that's the cover on the right). The novel, I believe, grew out of a story he mentions in an essay published in PEN America 8: Making Histories, entitled "The Life of a Word" (adapted from a talk given during the World Voices festival):

One of my love stories, "East of Violet," is set in a public library. The characters are a boy and a girl who are in love, but becase of cultural and familial restrictions and religious prohibitions, they cannot even meet on the street. To communicate, the young man checks out a book and puts purple dots under certain letters in the text. He returns the book and the girl checks out the same book. She finds the letters with the purple dots and connects them -- she decodes them -- and they become a love letter. The letters are all different depending on which book they have checked out, whether it is Anna Karenina or The Little Prince or The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

And speaking of Scott Esposito and Making Histories, he also flags a piece by Rodrigo Fresán on "the Mexican novel as written by foreigners," which inevitably discusses Roberto Bolaño. Fresán's very funny conversation with Jonathan Lethem took place at the 2006 World Voices festival and appears in PEN America 8; you can read Fresán's essay about Bolaño, whom he knew well, in the March 2007 issue of The Believer.

Monday Miscellany

Many thanks to the scores of writers and readers who dropped by the PEN booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival. In addition to the wonderful writers listed below, we had unexpected visits from George Saunders and Jonathan Lethem. Mo Willems, left, enthusiastically hawked our wares and entertained the crowd; Mary Gaitskill and Jonathan Lethem, right, chatted with each other as well as our many visitors; and Mohammed Naseehu Ali, center, brought his beautiful family along. (Click on the photos to enlarge.)

Garth Riske Hallberg nicely captures the general atmosphere.

Among the many other "vendors" at the festival were our friends at CLMP (the Council for Literary Magazines and Presses). Together with the Virginia Quarterly Review, they've recently made available this interesting discussion about the commercial challenges facing literary fiction, featuring Jonathan Burnham, Morgan Entrekin, Jonathan Galassi, and Sonny Mehta, and moderated by Sarah Nelson.

Speaking of VQR, their next issue looks terrific. It's a special issue, "dedicated to the topic of South America in the 21st century," and includes contributions from Daniel Alarcon and the late Roberto Bolaño among other luminaries.

If you're free on Wednesday evening, in New York, and interested in children's literature, don't miss "Dreadful Lies, Peculiar Truths," "a PEN Children’s Book panel discussion featuring Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Susan Kuklin, Robert Lipsyte, and Vera B. Williams."

This panel of prize-winning authors will explore the quandary in which many children’s book writers often find themselves: how do we respect the boundaries, and imaginations, of our young audiences when writing about harrowing topics? How do we portray difficult circumstances without foisting an adult point of view on our readers? Come to this free discussion of these issues and more.

Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, and the Brooklyn Book Festival

The second annual Brooklyn Book Festival is this Sunday, September 16, with events to be held at Brooklyn Borough Hall (Court and Joralemon Streets), the adjacent Borough Hall Plaza and Columbus Park, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and St. Francis College. All events are free and open to the public.

PEN will have a booth there, space #35, in Borough Hall Plaza, where some amazing writers will stop by to answer questions and to talk about why they’re members of PEN:

9:45-10:45 Colin Channer & Ana Castillo
1:00-1:30 Mo Willems
1:30-2:30 Mary Gaitskill & Jonathan Safran Foer
2:30-3:30 PEN President Francine Prose & A.M. Homes
3:30-4:30 George Packer & Tim McLoughlin
4:30-5:30 Mohammed Naseehu Ali

And, at 11:30, we’ll be giving away free copies of PEN America to the first 50 writers and readers who come by to say hello. We’ll answer questions about the mission of PEN America, how to subscribe and support the magazine, etc. So come see us.

The night before the festival, a “Book Festival Gala VIP event” will be held, where beloved Brooklyn author Paul Auster will be the guest of honor. Auster has received a number of accolades by now, of course. Nonetheless, as he explained in issue 5 of PEN America, “no writer” has “any idea” what his work is actually worth. It’s a lesson he learned from Samuel Beckett, with whom Auster spoke on a few occasions in Paris. This particular lesson he learned at their first meeting, in the early seventies, when Auster was about twenty-five years old.

...at some point during the conversation, Beckett told me that he had just finished translating Mercier et Camier, which was his first French novel; it had been written about twenty-five years earlier.

I had read the book in French and liked it very much, and I said, “A wonderful book.” I was just a kid, after all. I couldn’t suppress my enthusiasm.

Beckett shook his head and said, “Oh no, no, not very good. In fact, I’ve cut out about 25 percent of the original. The English version’s going to be a lot shorter than the French.

And I said (remember how young I was), “Why would you do such a thing? It’s a wonderful book. You shouldn’t have taken a word out.”

He shook his head and he said, “No, no, not very good, not very good.”

We went on to talk about other things, and then, out of the blue, ten or fifteen minutes later, apropos of nothing, he leaned forward across the table and he said to me, very earnestly, “You really liked it, huh? You really thought it was good?”

This was Samuel Beckett, remember. And not even he had any idea of what his work was worth. Good or bad, meaningful or not, no writer ever knows, not even the best ones. And I suppose especially not the best ones.