PEN America 13: Lovers

Who is dear to you? The new issue of PEN America—at the printer now; you can order it here—considers that question through fiction, poetry, short essays, comics, and conversations. Among the highlights:

* Patti Smith talks with talks with Jonathan Lethem about her love for William Blake, John Coltrane, Allen Ginsberg, and more.

* Don DeLillo’s 1983 “Human Moments in World War III” imagines the loneliness of a man in space, meditating on his fading connection to his old planet. Alongside this story is a Q & A on writing, technology, religion, and paranoia, conducted by fax (as you can see, DeLillo crafted his elegant answers on a typewriter).

* Writers salute their literary loves in the issue’s forum (and, online, readers can describe their own). Among the contributions: Yusef Komunyakaa on Frederick Douglass, Anne Landesman on J.M. Coetzee, Lily Tuck on Joan Didion, John Barth on his four fictional “navigation-stars,” and Jessica Hagedorn on Roberto Bolaño.

* Several new short stories, including “The Pretty Grown Together Children,” in which Megan Mayhew Bergman conjures the voice of conjoined twins, and “Before the Next World Cup,” Eshkol Nevo’s story of friends who consider the future with the aid of the world’s favorite sporting event.

* John Ashbery translates Rimbaud's Illuminations (print only), and also contributes a beautiful new poem, “Resettlement.” The issue also features poems by Faraj Bayrakdar, Akinwumi Isola, Natalia Sannikova, and more.

As an exclusive online feature, we’ve also put together a gallery by Daisy Rockwell, aka Lapata, called “The Rasas of Terror.” Rockwell’s painting Couple graces the cover, pictured above.

There’s much more in the issue itself, which you can order here—or better yet, subscribe, and get a free copy of the 2010 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, featuring Alice Munro, Annie Proulx, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and other great writers.

Lethem & Smith, Monzó & Coover, Ford & Hazzard & more: conversations @ PEN World Voices

As I’ve mentioned before, one-one-one conversations are among my favorite World Voices events. This year, several of the pairings seem especially felicitous.

On Thursday (7 pm, Center for Jewish History), Michael Orthofer of The Complete Review (and its Literary Saloon) will talk to Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo about home, living under threat, and the art of breaking up. (Orthofer knows international literature as well as anyone, so I’d love to make this one—but I'll be elsewhere.)

On Friday (3:30, Deutsches Haus), Robert Coover will talk with Quim Monzó about the latter’s new book, Gasoline, out soon from Open Letter. Monzó has been compared as a writer to Coover, whose influence he has acknowledged—and whose work he has translated—so that should make for an interesting discussion.

Similarly, Richard Ford has expressed his admiration for the work of Shirley Hazzard (whose novel The Bay of Noon was just shortlisted for the Booker Prize for... 1970), with whom he’ll talk on Friday night (7 pm, 92nd Street Y). The evening will feature readings of Hazzard’s work by friends and admirers, including Annabel Davis-Goff and others.

The following afternon, Jonathan Lethem talks with Patti Smith (1 pm, Cooper Union). If you’ve read Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist, then you know this should be good—and apparently Smith and Lethem are both big Bolaño fans.

Later that day, Philippine-born writer and Miguel Syjuco will talk with his former teacher, Nicholas Jose, now the director of Australian Studies at Harvard. Syjuco won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize for Illustrado, which will be published in the U.S. next week.

And on Sunday I’m going to talk with Rawi Hage (3 pm, FIAF), whose excellent book Cockroach was excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

If you can’t make it to the events themselves, audio (and, in some cases, video) will go up within a week or so after they take place. So stay tuned.

Our contributors elsewhere + other links

Words Without Borders has a new anthology coming soon: The Wall in My Head features “fiction, essays, images, and original documents” that aim “to pick up where most popular accounts of the Cold War end, and trace the path of the revolutionary spirit of 1989 from its origins to the present day.”

Among the many intriguing pieces in the book is an essay by Judith Sollosy that began as a guest post for this very blog: “Regardless of the Cost,” on Péter Esterházy’s Revised Edition. (You can see the table of contents at Three Percent, the blog for Open Letter, which is publishing the book.)

You can read Judith’s piece here, and read all our guest posts—including Wayne Koestenbaum on Elizabeth Hardwick, Amy Bloom on Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen, and more—here.

James Yeh, whose story “Some Kind of Change” appears in PEN America 10, has just had a one-line short story illustrated by Arthur Jones for his Post-It Notes Stories Project. James also recently published a very funny interview with Gary Shteyngart on the subject of meat, and another interview, in the new online publication The Faster Times, with John Wray, on the topic of writing on the subway.

Scott Esposito finds something Barack Obama and Roberto Bolaño have in common: each has had his books banned from an American prison.

PEN’s latest online translation slam features a political slogan that has been taken up by Iranian protesters in response to an insult levied at them by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The “structure of the slogan recalls a ghazal included in the collection Divaan-eh Shams by Rumi, the classic 13th century Persian poet” which suggests “the extent to which poetry plays a role in the Iranian upbringing and consciousness.” Ahmadinejad referred to them as khas-o-khaashaak, meaning dirt and dust, scraps and bits. Here’s Niloufar Talebi’s version of the reply:

You’re just riffraff, lower than dirt,
I'm the aching lover, blazing and lit.
You’re the black halo, oppressive and blind,
I’m the brave hero and this land is mine!

Lastly, a reminder: tonight at 7 pm Shaul Bakhash, Roger Cohen, Haleh Esfandiari, and Karim Sadjadpour will discuss Iran at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center.

Bolaño’s fears, Armenian fiction, etc.

Elissa Bassist has cataloged “the phobias in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666” for The Rumpus -- a catalog that, though I’ve not yet read the book, naturally caught my eye. Among the fears:

Tricophobia: “fear of hair” (where some “cases end in suicide”)

Optophobia: “fear of opening the eyes” (this is “even worse” than the fear of eyes because “in a literal sense, it leads to violent attacks, loss of consciousness, visual and auditory hallucinations, and generally aggressive behavior”)

Phobophobia: “fear of fear itself” (Campos comments, “If you’re afraid of your own fears, you’re forced to live in constant contemplation of them, and if they materialize, what you have is a system that feeds on itself, a vicious cycle.”)

Last night, it so happens, Natasha Wimmer received the PEN Translation Prize for 2666. According to the judges, Wimmer’s “moving translation... perfectly matches the considerable emotional heft of this vast, man-faceted novel, now rightly seen as a milestone in world literature.”

Also celebrated last night were the PEN Translation Fund Grants, which “support the translation of book-length works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or drama that have not previously appeared in English or have appeared only in an egregiously flawed translation.” Most of these projects are currently without publishers, though if the past is any guide, that will likely change after this recognition.

Among this year’s recipients is Geoffrey Michael Goshgarian for The Remnants by Hagop Oshagan (1883-1948), a historical novel widely considered, according to the citation, “one of the greatest masterpieces of Armenian literature,” written in the early 1930s “to save what remained of our people.” You can read an excerpt at Words Without Borders. The introduction to that excerpt describes the book as

a literary reconstruction of the pre-genocide world of the Armenians told through the horrific collapse of a family -- the Nalbandians. The book was to have three parts, but Oshagan was unable to write the third part, which was to be devoted to teh extermination of the Armenians, depicting the twenty-four hours during which the Armenian population of Bursa was annihilated.

The Armenian genocide has been in the news here lately, since Obama -- who said that “America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian genocide” during the presidential campaign -- has been treading carefully through the matter lately. And, of course, Orhan Pamuk’s frank acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide is what got him in trouble with the Turkish government -- trouble that, sadly, has recently revived.

In happier news, via the Literary Saloon, Pamuk’s novel Snow recently became the first of his books to appear in Armenian. And speaking of both Armenian artists and The Rumpus, that fledgling website has a new interview up with Atom Egoyan.


PS. I’ve updated the previous post to include a link to Rawi Hage’s piece in the new issue, which is available online. And as long as I'm updating that post, this letter from an Army National Guard lieutenant colonel makes, I think, for a powerful coda.

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.

PEN online

If you read this blog regularly, you already know that the main website for PEN American Center is www.PEN.org, where you’ll find podcasts, poetry, fiction (by Bolaño!), and much more.

You may not know, however, that PEN is now on Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, and iTunes. Or that PEN.org has added several RSS feeds.

So have a look. Comments and questions welcome, as always.

World Voices continues; also, Bolaño

Next Tuesday, June 10th, at 7 pm, at Housing Works Used Books Café, PEN World Voices presents the first installment of year-round programming with a special evening of conversation and reading by Uwem Akpan (pictured right). Uwem, a Nigerian writer who now teaches at a Jesuit seminary in Zimbabwe, will read from his debut story collection, Say You're One of Them, and then speak with Anderson Tepper of Vanity Fair.

Uwem (whom you can read online in The New Yorker), read once before at a PEN event, with Nam Le-- whose great (and much deserved) reviews you may have seen lately.

Also, more and more of the audio from World Voices 2008 is becoming available at PEN.org, so you can catch up on the events you missed (or make sure so-and-so really said that). Check back here for updates.

This is World in Translation Month, apparently, and PEN.org is celebrating with new features each week. So, if you aren't one of the lucky ones who received 2666 galleys, you can read some older Bolaño ("Dance Card," from Last Evenings on Earth and Other Stories) here.

And if you're in Los Angeles this weekend, visit PEN at BookExpo America.

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.