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.

Friday event for PEN America 14: The Good Books

As I mentioned last week, the first copies of PEN America 14: The Good Books arrived in New York today. We'll have excerpts to read online after the festival is over, but if you're in New York, you'll find copies at select World Voices events -- including "The Great Global Book Swap," a reading and conversation we're holding on Friday in connection with the new issue.

For the Friday event, Leila Aboulela, Nathacha Appanah, Mario Bellatín, and Rahul Bhattacharya have chosen books they read in translation that meant a great deal to them as readers and writers. They will read short excerpts from their selections and discuss why they chose the books they did -- and we'll also discuss the larger subject of literature in translation around the world. Collectively, our Friday panelists have lived in France, India, Mexico, Mauritius, Qatar, Scotland, Sudan, and at least one or two other places as well.

This is a live version of our new issue's forum, in which over 50 writers (among them: Madison Smartt Bell, Amitava Kumar, Yiyun Li, Karen Russell, Lynne Tillman, and many more) imagine they've been invited to a great global book swap, and must bring one book in translation. There are many wonderful choices beautifully explained, and we'll be sharing a number of those pieces here and at PEN.org in the weeks to come.

In the meantime, I hope you can join us on Friday. Here are the full details:

When: Friday, April 29
Where: Scandinavia House, 58 Park Ave., New York City
What time: 2–3:30 p.m.

With Leila Aboulela, Nathacha Appanah, Mario Bellatín, and Rahul Bhattacharya
Free and open to the public. No reservations required.

Co-sponsored by Scandinavia House and PEN America

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Imagine you are invited to a great global book swap and have to bring just one beloved book originally written in a foreign tongue: what would it be? Join five eminent writers who have trotted the globe and lived everywhere from Mexico to Mauritius, India to Sudan, for a reading and a talk about the works of translation that enriched and changed their lives.

PEN World Voices next week!

Issue #14 of PEN America will arrive on Monday -- with copies going out to subscribers, PEN members, and bookstores shortly after -- along with news here about all the great stuff that's in it. In the meantime, a few highlights from the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, happening in New York City all next week.

These are ticketed events with limited seating, so if you're interested you should act soon. There are also many free events, next week; have a look at the whole schedule.

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Revolutionaries in the Arab World

Wednesday, April 27, 7:30 p.m.
92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center

Hear from experts and on-the-ground bloggers how social media and citizen journalism galvanize the revolution. In the borderless world of the Internet, where revolutionary ideas spread at lightning speed, will other despotic regimes collapse? Which ones? And how does an autocracy transition into a democracy, and at what cost? Alex Nunns, editor of Tweets from Tahrir -- a collection of key tweets from the activists who brought heady days of revolution to Egypt in early 2011 -- will be joined by Palestinian author/journalist Rula Jebreal (Miral), blogger Issandr El Amrani (The Arabist), Moroccan writer Abdellah Taia, and Moroccan-Dutch writer Adbelkader Benali to tackle these urgent questions.

Tickets: $20/$15 PEN Members, students with valid ID.

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China in Two Acts

Thursday, April 28, 7 p.m.
The Cooper Union, Great Hall

Born in Beijing and educated in the United States, New Yorker contributor Zha Jianying delivers unique insight into the rapidly changing world inside China, including the plights of the country's best-known artist Ai Wei Wei and Nobel peace Prize winner and political prisoner Liu Xiaobo. In a 30-minute presentation, Zha sheds light on the polarized political order and the cultural forces that are shaping the world’s most populous nation. Following Zha’s remarks, a panel of journalists and writers join her on stage for a lively debate of her assertions.

Tickets: $15/$10 PEN Members, students with valid ID.

Note: The Chinese governemnt has barred Liao Yiwu from attending the festival. Read more here.

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Poetry: The Second Skin
Friday, April 29, 7:30 pm
92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center

An evening of poetry and music curated and emceed by Laurie Anderson. With a stellar line-up of international poets, including John Burnside (Scotland), Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua), David-Dephy Gogibedashvili (Georgia), Hasina Gul (Pakistan), Yusef Komunyakaa (US), Juan Carlos Mestre (Spain), Joachim Sartorius (Germany), and Pia Tafdrup (Denmark).

Tickets: $25/$20 PEN and PSA Members, students with valid ID.

Next week: Stoppard, Doctorow, DeLillo & the Belarus Free Theater

Just a few weeks ago, the members of the Belarus Free Theater were either in jail or in hiding. Now they are performing their play Being Harold Pinter as part of the Under the Radar Festival in New York. Soon they will be back in Belarus, where they will continue to risk the wrath of President Aleksandr Lukashenko, the man known as “Europe’s last dictator.”

On the eve of their return to Minsk, the Belarus Free Theater joins internationally-acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard, PEN American Center, and a stellar supporting cast for an evening celebrating artistic freedom and the courage of hundreds of writers, artists, journalists, and intellectuals targeted in Lukashenko’s latest crackdown following the nation’s flawed December elections.

Czech musician Iva Bittova and American actor Billy Crudup will join Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Tom Stoppard, and surprise guests for a farewell gathering featuring literature, music, and cocktail conversation about the power of art and the future of Belarus.

Viva the Belarus Free Theater

When: Wednesday, January 19, 7 p.m.
Where: Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, New York City
Who: Billy Crudup, E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Tom Stoppard, Iva Bittova, the Belarus Free Theater, and surprise guests

Tickets: $25. Visit lepoissonrouge.com.

All proceeds to benefit the Belarus Free Theater.

(Photograph of the Belarus Free Theatre performing in London taken by Keith Pattison.)

All Along the Silk Road: Music and Literature from China

This Saturday, PEN, WNYC, and PianoCulture.com present the second installment of their literary and musical collaboration: “All Along the Silk Road,” featuring a piano performance by Fei-Fei Dong, a reading by Gish Jen, and a tea tasting that will include Chinese snacks.

The event will take place at 7 pm in WNYC’s lovely and intimate Greene Space at 44 Charlton Street in downtown Manhattan. Tickets are available here, and full details are below. Hope you can make it.

When: Saturday, December 4, 7 pm
Where: The Greene Space at WNYC, 44 Charlton St., New York City
Who: Fei-Fei Dong and Gish Jen; hosted by Ina Parker-Howard

Talib Kweli, Junot Diaz, Wally Lamb and more: Prison Writing Benefit, November 1

On Monday, November 1, at 7 pm, in New York City, Talib Kweli (pictured right), Junot Díaz, Lisa Dierbeck, Wahida Clark, Barbara Parsons, Sean Dalpiaz, Wally Lamb, and more will gather for a benefit reading and reception to support the PEN Prison Writing Program—which, since 1971, has sponsored an annual writing contest, published a free handbook about writing 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.

(We have frequently published work by the finalists and winners of the contest in PEN America; see, for example, Chris Everley’s excellent “Hook Island Traveler,” published in PEN America 9: Checkpoints.)

A reception will follow the reading of fiction, poetry, and memoir by men and women who have participated in the PEN Prison Writing Program. We hope you’ll join us. Full details are below.


Breakout: Voices from Inside

When: Monday, November 1, 7 p.m.
Where: Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St., New York City
Tickets: Collaborator: $75 (limited quantity); Friend: $50. Please be advised that there is a 2 item order minimum. Purchase tickets at lepoissonrouge.com.

Collaborator ticket covers the expenses of one-on-one mentoring services between a PEN Member and an incarcerated man or woman for one year. This premier ticket includes the best views and a reception following the program.

Friend ticket covers the postage and printing costs to provide eight incarcerated men and women with a free copy of PEN’s Handbook for Writers in Prison. This ticket includes a reception following the program.

Tomorrow night: Censorhip by Bullet in Mexico

Tomorrow night, American and Mexican writers and journalists—including Paul Auster, Calvin Baker, Don DeLillo, Laura Esquivel, and Francine Prose—will gather at Cooper Union to call attention to and discuss “censorship by bullet” in Mexico—the silencing of reporters investigating violence and corruption connected with the drug trade. At least eight journalists have been murdered in Mexico in 2010 alone; many more have been kidnapped, threatened, or disappeared.

Also reading tomorrow evening are Jose Zamora, Víctor Manuel Mendiola, and Luis Miguel Aguilar. After the readings, Carmen Aristegui of CNN en Español, Rocio Gallegos of El Diario de Juárez, and José Luis Martínez of Milenio Diario will talk about the situation in their country; the conversation will be moderated by Julia Preston of The New York Times.


State of Emergency: Censorship by Bullet in Mexico

When: Tueday, October 19, 7 p.m.

Where: The Great Hall Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street, NYC

Tickets: $15/$10 for PEN Members and students with valid ID. Visit www.smarttix.com or call (212) 868-4444. Tickets also available at the door. Seating is by general admission, on a first-come, first-served basis.

PEN round-up: Don DeLillo, World Voices, Mexican journalists, and more

As we put the finishing touches on the fall issue, the PEN office is bustling.

Today, the 2010 PEN Literary Award winners were announced. Among them, Don DeLillo, who answered questions from PEN (via fax) on the occasion:

PEN: Thanks to e-books, blogs, and social media, writers are arguably using new technology as never before. Stories are written using Twitter, novels as text messages, and there seems to be a reemergence of serial narratives. Do you think technology will have a considerable influence on fiction? Do you think it already has?

DeLillo: The question is whether the enormous force of technology, and its insistence on speeding up time and compacting space, will reduce the human need for narrative—narrative in the traditional sense. Novels will become user-generated. An individual will not only tap a button that gives him a novel designed to his particular tastes, needs, and moods, but he’ll also be able to design his own novel, very possibly with him as main character. The world is becoming increasingly customized, altered to individual specifications. This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people speak, write, and read. Here’s a stray question (or a metaphysical leap): Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page? Does the beauty and variability of our language depend to an important degree on the medium that carries the words? Does poetry need paper?

To celebrate DeLillo’s award, our fall issue will include his 1983 short story “Human Moments in World War III,” the beginning of which you can read on PEN.org. For the rest, pre-order your copy of the issue (or subscribe!).

And, if you’re in New York, join us for the 2010 PEN Literary Awards ceremony on October 13.

News of this year’s winners followed just a day after PEN announced its new Director of the World Voices Festival and Public Programs, László Jakab Orsós, who joins PEN from the Hungarian Cultural Center. Jakab is also an accomplished journalist and screenwriter. You can read more about him here. The 2011 World Voices Festival will be held from April 25 to May 1.

Lastly, a trio of announcements from the Freedom to Write department: Liao Yiwu (discussed previously on the blog) has finally been permitted to travel outside China; PEN writers urged the U.N. to abandon efforts to legally prohibit the defamation of religion; and several writers from Mexico and the United States (including DeLillo) will gather next month to discuss and call attention to the violent suppression of journalists in America’s neighbor to the south. Please join us if you can.

PEN Quiz Night + the Brooklyn Book Festival

It’s busy here as we finish the fall issue; details coming soon.

In the meantime, join me this Friday, at 7 pm, along with a great group of writers—Jami Attenberg, Jane Ciabattari, Lisa Dierbeck, Rivka Galchen, Tayari Jones, Joseph O’Neill, Wesley Stace, and Justin Taylor—for the first PEN Quiz Night, at St. Ann’s Warehouse, on 38 Water Street in DUMBO in Brooklyn.

The quiz will start promptly at 8 pm, but you should arrive early for drinks and to be matched on an author’s team. That way you can compete both with and against some terrific writers. All the questions will be literary.

Quiz Night is PEN’s kickoff for the Brooklyn Book Festival, which takes place on Sunday. PEN will have a booth there, and has also put together a reading to mark the 50th Anniversary of PEN’s Freedom to Write program, which will include Cathy Park Hong, Roxana Robinson, Sarah Schulman, Xiaoda Xiao, and more.

Hope to see you there. (Pictured above: Joseph O’Neill, Rivka Galchen, Tayari Jones.)

Tonight: Tariq Ramadan in NYC and online

Tariq Ramadan arrived in the United States yesterday, his first visit since 2004, when the Bush administration revoked his visa using a provision from the Patriot Act. When he arrived at Newark International Report, there remained “one last hurdle,” according to The New York Times: “a closed-door session with three immigration agents, one after the other, who asked him where he planned to go, whom he planned to meet and what he planned to discuss.”

Tonight at 7 p.m. he’ll discuss secularism, Islam, and democracy with Dalia Mogahed, George Packer, Joan Wallach Scott, and Jacob Weisberg at Cooper Union in New York. Tickets are no longer on sale online, but there may be some available at the door. For those who can’t make it or can’t get in, the event will be shown online here.

Livestream of tonight's event + other links

If you can’t make it to tonight’s event, “Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the ‘War on Terror’,” in Washington, D.C., you can watch it live here at 7 p.m.

The Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, “whose work has consistently challenged the country’s social strictures, especially as they pertain to women,” was reportedly arrested along with his wife, his daughter, and 15 dinner guests, at his home on Monday night. (Via. Read about PEN’s Iran campaign, “Our Society Will Be a Free Society,” here.)

Sam Lipsyte’s new book The Ask is getting great reviews all around; you can listen to him read from the hilarious Home Land over at PEN.org.

Lastly, the excellent blog 3 Quarks Daily is awarding their annual prizes for “the best blog writing in the areas of science, philosophy, politics, and arts & literature.” Tomasz Rozycki’s guest post about his poem “Scorched Maps” is a nominee in the latter category; you can vote for it here (but only once!). The finalists will be judged by the American poet Robert Pinsky.

Nobel Peace Prize nominations

Yesterday, Anthony Appiah, the current president of PEN American Center, published a letter nominating Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace Prize, citing Liu’s “distinguished and principled leadership in the area of human and political rights and freedom of expression.”

Appiah’s letter was endorsed by a number of prominent PEN members, among them Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Jhumpa Lahiri, and several of the writers who rallied for Liu Xiaobo on New Year’s Eve, including Edward Albee, E.L. Doctorow, and A.M. Homes (pictured right is a sign from the rally; the photo was taken by Brian Montopoli).

Vaclav Havel, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama have also asked the Nobel committee to consider Liu for the Peace Prize.

Ma Zhaoxu, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, “said it would be a mistake to give Liu such an award,” according to Ben Blanchard and Huang Yan of Reuters:

“If the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to such a person, it is obvious that it is totally wrong,” Ma told a regular news briefing in Beijing, without elaborating.

No citizen of China has ever won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Meanwhile, according to the AP, the head of Norway’s Conservative Party, Erna Solberg, nominated Russian human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina and her group Memorial for the Prize. PEN worked with Memorial to honor Natalia Estemirova, who was affiliated with Memorial, in October. Estemirova herself spoke with David Remnick about slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya at a 2006 PEN World Voices event; you can listen to their conversation at PEN.org.

Footnote to Zamora, news on Ramadan, reckoning with torture

One of the villains in “Public Demons,” the essay by José Rubén Zamora excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself and reprinted in The Utne Reader, was indicted in U.S. federal court on money-laundering charges yesterday. Alfonso Portillo was the president of Guatemala from 2000 to 2004. “The day Portillo came to my house,” Zamora writes, “he offered me $600,000 not to send my family out of the country because this—in his words—would affect his image.” The military had just violently raided Zamora’s house, terrorizing his family, after Zamora published unflattering things about the government and the military.

In other legal news, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed orders effectively ending the exclusion of Tariq Ramadan from the United States last week, which should resolve a lawsuit filed by PEN together with the ACLU, the American Association of University Professors, and the American Academy of Religions. (Ramadan is pictured right, appearing via video at the PEN World Voices festival during his exclusion.)

In 2004 Ramadan was prevented from accepting a tenured position at the University of Notre Dame when the Department of Homeland Security refused his visa application. He had been to the U.S. many times before; in 2002 he participated in a conference hosted by former president (and PEN America contributor!) Bill Clinton called “Islam and America in a Global World.” The refusal of Ramadan’s re-entry into the United States was an example of “ideological exclusion,” a Cold War practice that was revived after 9/11.

And speaking of post-9/11 policies: On March 3, PEN and the ACLU will hold another “Reckoning with Torture” event, this time in Washington, D.C. The event we held in New York in October was attended by seven hundred people and presented, I think, a moving and powerful account of what has taken place in the name of the United States over the last eight years (video here).

By the way, PEN’s Freedom to Write director, Larry Siems, is writing an account of U.S. torture policy post-9/11 for the ACLU, and he’s presenting the work online as he writes it, posting his thoughts as he goes (like this take on John Yoo’s recent Daily Show appearance) and getting feedback from experts. Check out The Torture Report.

Rally tomorrow @ NYPL, 11 a.m.

Update: Read Brian Montopoli's report on the rally at CBSNews.com.

On the steps of the New York Public Library: Hilma Wolitzer, A.M. Homes, Edward Albee, E.L. Doctorow, Honor Moore, Jessica Hagedorn, Steve Eisenberg, Don DeLillo, and Victoria Redel. More photos here.



Tomorrow at 11 a.m., on the steps of the New York Public Library, E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Edward Albee, A.M. Homes, Honor Moore, and others will read briefly from Liu's writings and call for his release.

Liu was sentenced on Christmas to 11 years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power." Read the verdict; learn more about the case; then email Hu Jintao and tell him to release Liu Xiaobo.

JOIN PEN
FOR A RALLY FOR
THE RELEASE OF LIU XIAOBO

When: New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2009
Where: Front steps of the New York Public Library, 5th Ave. at 42nd St., New York City
What time: 11:00 a.m.

With E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Edward Albee, A.M. Homes, Honor Moore, and other PEN Members

Press who plan to attend should RSVP to sarah@pen.org

“A crackpot chemist of words”: Nam Le talks with Richard Ford

“Is literature about ‘understanding’? Does that make sense to you?” So Richard Ford asks Nam Le (pictured left, in a photo by Nigel Parry taken for Esquire) in the pages of PEN America 11: Make Believe. The conversation is called “Fabrications,” and part of it is online (for the rest you'll need to buy the issue).

Nam tells Ford no, it doesn’t make sense to him; Ford says that makes him happy. To which Nam replies: “You shouldn’t take any comfort in that—a lot of things don’t make sense to me.” “I take my comfort where I take my comfort,” Ford responds.

The conversation is full of such quick, barbed, and illuminating back-and-forths. Ford asks Le about writers and place (“I think we’re all in an eternal nowhere all the time,” Le says), writers and lying (“what you’re doing as a writer is engaging in a big con”), writers and science (“I think of myself as an unashamed vitalist, a crackpot chemist of words”), writers and politics (“I think we use the word ‘politics’ the way we use the word ‘emotion’... ‘Aw, I got really emotional at that point,’ we say, as though emotion is something that exists on the edge of experience... but we’re awash in an ocean of emotion all the time”).

Eventually Le gets going about the problems with “character-based fiction.” He doesn't want readers, he says, to think that “a story between this person and that person is the ambassadorial story for their time and place in history.” And they go on to discuss writing reviews (or not), Nam’s story “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” and the way that writing fiction can be, as Ford puts it, “a kind of clerical nightmare.”

Read the online portion, then pick up a copy and enjoy the rest.

PS. There are two PEN events coming up soon. The first is on Wednesday, December 2, at Housing Works at 7 pm. Uwem Akpan, Juan Felipe Herrera, Lily Hoang, and Brendan Curry will talk with Jane Ciabattari of the National Book Critics Circle in celebration of the 2009 Beyond Margins Awards.

Then, a week from today, at 6:30 pm at NYU Law School, a group writers, legal scholars, and advocates including Nadine Strossen, Laura W. Murphy, Walter Dean Myers, Jonathan Todres, Deborah Ellis, Uzodinma Iweala, and Susan Kuklin will discuss the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which the U.N. General Assembly unanimously adopted in 1989 and which was instituted as international law in 1990. The U.S. and Somalia remain the only two U.N. member nations that have not ratified this document.

Both events are free and open to the public.

Nov. 9: Bogosian, Gaitskill, Turturro & others read prison writing

Next Monday, November 9, PEN’s Prison Writing Program will hold its second annual benefit reading and reception, with readings by Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian, John Turturro, Patricia Smith, Jamal Joseph, Lemon Andersen, and other guests. 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.

Tickets available here. Full details below.

Breakout: Voices from Inside

When: Monday, November 9 Where: WNYC Greene Space, 44 Charlton Street, NYC What time: 7 p.m. With Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian, John Turturro, Patricia Smith, Jamal Joseph, Lemon Andersen, and other guests Tickets: Collaborator: $75/Friend: $50 Collaborator ticket covers the expenses of one-on-one mentoring services between a PEN member and an incarcerated man or woman for one year. This premier ticket includes the best views and a reception following the program. Friend ticket covers the postage and printing costs to provide eight incarcerated men and women with a free copy of PEN’s Handbook for Writers in Prison. This ticket includes a reception following the program. At “Breakout: Voices from Inside,” PEN Members and friends will read award-winning work from PEN’s Prison Writing Program. For more than 30 years, the Program has been dedicated to helping make the harsh realities of American imprisonment part of our social justice dialogue. The Prison Writing Program has also been on the front-lines of prison reform, helping inmates in federal, state, and local penitentiaries cope with life behind bars, gain skills, and have a voice while they are there. “Breakout: Voices from Inside” will help raise much-needed funds to enable our important program to continue its most important mission into the future—helping incarcerated men and women to see themselves in a new way: as writers.

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

Subscription offer & launch party

This year, PEN partnered with the long-standing O. Henry Prize, which annually selects twenty of the year’s best stories written in English. The latest edition of the anthology includes stories by Junot Díaz, Nadine Gordimer, Ha Jin, and many other excellent writers.

While supplies last, we are giving copies of The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009 to all new PEN America subscribers. A one-year subscription is just $18, and you can subscribe online at www.pen.org/subscribe.

Subscriptions begin with our brand new issue #11, Make Believe, which we’re celebrating on Monday in New York City. Paul Auster and Roxana Robinson will read short selections from the issue, and several other contributors—including Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Cynthia Cruz, and Lynne Tillman—will also be there. The event is free and open to the public. Details below.


PEN America #11 Launch Party
When: Monday, October 26
Where: Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street (between Sullivan & Thompson), NYC
What time: 6:30–8:30 p.m.

With Paul Auster, Roxana Robinson, and other special guests

Free and open to the public

George Saunders, Jonathan Ames, Ishmael Beah & others join Tuesday’s lineup

Regular blogging will resume here later this month, with news about PEN America 11, our contributors appearing elsewhere, and other items of note. In the meantime, an update concerning “Reckoning with Torture: Memos & Testimonies from the 'War on Terror',” taking place Tuesday, October 13, at 7 pm, at the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City.

Jonathan Ames, K. Anthony Appiah, Ishmael Beah, David Cole, Nell Freudenberger, A.M. Homes, Susanna Moore, and George Saunders have joined the roster of readers that already included Matthew Alexander, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Eve Ensler, Jameel Jaffer, Jack Rice, Art Spiegelman, and Amrit Singh. They will read together and separately a variety of documents attesting to acts of torture committed on behalf of the U.S. government since 9/11. The evening will also feature three short videos and a special installation by the artist Jenny Holzer, whose work you can see here and here.

We hope you’ll join us. Tickets are available here (and at the door), and full details are below.

When: Tuesday, October 13
Where: The Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 East 7th St., NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

Tickets: $15/$10 for PEN/ACLU Members and students with valid ID at www.smarttix.com. Tickets may also be purchased at the door.

DeLillo et al read torture memos, 10/13

On October 13, PEN American Center will team up with the ACLU to stage a public reading of recently-released government files—memos (like this one: PDF), declassified communications, and testimonies by detainees—documenting acts of torture carried out on behalf of the U.S. government since September 11, 2001. Tickets are on sale here.

The event is part of an ongoing effort by writers associated with PEN to call attention to and reflect on these abuses. Among the participants are writers Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Eve Ensler, and Art Spiegelman. They will be joined by former U.S. interrogator Matthew Alexander, former CIA officer Jack Rice, ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh, and the artist Jenny Holzer.

I'll be sharing more news about this project in the future; in the meantime, full details for the October 13 event are below.

When: Tuesday, October 13
Where: The Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 East 7th St., NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

Tickets: $15/$10 for PEN/ACLU Members and students with valid ID at www.smarttix.com. Tickets may also be purchased at the door.

(The note card pictured above is explained here; click on the photo to enlarge. The lines on the card are from "To Be Human," a short piece by Anouar Benmalek published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.)