The Good Books

Selections from PEN America 14: The Good Books are now online! Here are a few of things you can check out over at PEN.org:

Forum: The Good Books
Welcome to the World's Greatest Book Swap: writers sharing books that they love--what could be better? We were blown away by the thoughtful responses we received, and by how many! Over fifty writers participated in our virtual swap. We've posted a few, with more to come. For now, have a look at Maurice Berger on Roland Barthes's Mythologies and Barack Obama; Srikanth Reddy on Chinese Tales and translating a translated translation; Rabih Alameddine on The Book of Disquiet and the many heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa.

The 1986 PEN Congress, 25 years later
We culled through almost 3,000 pages of previously unpublished transcripts to bring you highlights from a literary event spearheaded by Norman Mailer and featuring Arthur Miller, Nadine Gordimer, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison, Czeslaw Milosz, and many more. (Check out Rhoda Koenig's long write-up of the event in New York Magazine for some of the glamor and gossip surrounding the '86 Congress.)

Among the pieces we included is one we call "From Voice to Voice," in which remarks by Saul Bellow touch off responses from Allen Ginsberg, Nadine Gordimer, Susan Sontag--but enough with my name-dropping, go have a look yourself. And make sure to read "From the Floor," too, in which Grace Paley and Margaret Atwood protest the under-representation of women writers at the Congress (and Norman Mailer offers his perhaps inflammatory rebuttal).

World Voices
The issue also features fiction, poetry, and essays by some of the participants in this year's PEN World Voices Festival, including Marcelo Figueras, Asaf Schurr, Najat El Hachmi. And there are three essays from Finding the Words, an anthology compiled by our sister chapter PEN Canada: Pasha Malla & Moez Surani assemble an "Ethical Code for Writers," Alain de Botton revisits places of unexpected inspiration in "On Writing," and Madeleine Thien ghost-hunts through Cambodia and Vietnam in "Photocopies of Photocopies: On Bao Ninh."

Artwork
What's the sound of a sword cutting into a book? A book being sliced? Paper falling? ZAK, SHAKA, BARA BARA. Check out Book, a great comic by Yuichi Yokoyama with awesome onomatopoeic translations by Taro Nettleton. There's more book slicing and dicing to be seen in the sculptures of Brian Dettmer (our wonderful cover artist), and some quotation re-appropriation by Jenny Holzer.

As usual, you can find all of this and more if you subscribe to PEN America or purchase a copy of the journal.

Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison, Richard Price, Patti Smith, Salman Rushdie, Roddy Doyle, Melvin Van Peebles...

...as you may have heard, those are just a few of the participants in this year’s PEN World Voices Festival. My favorite reply to the newly unveiled lineup comes from Mark Sarvas: “the organizers appear to have outdone themselves,” he says, adding, “it’s enough to tempt me into thinking about a trip east to cover this one for all my loyal readers.” I hope we see him soon.

Much more in this space over the next few weeks, of course; in the meantime, a few notes before the weekend:

* As noted earlier this week in The New York Times, PEN and the ACLU are teaming up with Slate to sponsor a conversation with Tariq Ramadan and others, held at Cooper Union in New York on April 8. This will be the first U.S. appearance for Ramadan since he was barred from entering the country by the Bush administration.

* Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s novel Munira’s Bottle was written up recently in Arab News (via The Literary Saloon). The novel was excerpted in PEN America 9, earning the magazine its first Pushcart Prize. Here’s what Annie Proulx has to say about the book:

Munira’s Bottle is a rich and skillfully crafted story of a dysfunctional Saudi Arabian family. One of its strengths lies in its edgy characters: Munira, a sultry, self-centered, sexually repressed woman; Ibn Al-Dahhal, the bold imposter who deceives and betrays her; and Muhammad, her perpetually angry and righteous brother, a catalyst who forces the events. Western readers will welcome it for its opening door into Arab lives and minds.

(You can read a conversation about “Books that Changed My Life” featuring both Proulx and Al-Mohaimeed in PEN America 10.)

* Tomorrow we’ll find out how much Robert Pinsky liked Tomasz Rozycki’s piece about “Scorched Maps,” a finalist for The Quark. Among the other finalists is PEN America contributor Amitava Kumar.

* There’s no online announcement yet, but PEN America has received its first Utne Independent Press Award nomination, in the category of international coverage. More on that soon.

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.

Our contributors elsewhere + other links

“I can read, as I just did, stuffing my face with a disgusting greasy croissant, and I am still totally immersed in the world of this poem which resists weeping so desperately the whole thing feels like spring to me, all desire.” PEN America 10 contributor Lucy Corin on Frank O'Hara's “Morning” over at The Rumpus.

“...what stops me is a remark that Franzen makes about his Chinese guide. David Xu has 'the fashionably angular eyeglasses and ingratiating eagerness of an untenured literature professor.' In that throwaway phrase, in its quick malice and wit, I come home... I realize that I'm a sad provincial; for years, I've been living in a place called the English Department.” -- PEN America contributor Amitava Kumar in the minnesota review.

You can read four of the essays from Burn this Book, published by HarperStudio in connection with PEN American Center, at DailyLit, starting with a speech by Toni Morrison, which you can watch her deliver here. See also this review in the Los Angeles Times.

The first story in Knockemstiff, by recent PEN honoree Donald Ray Pollock, is available online.

Jedediah Berry, former associate editor of PEN America, recently published his first novel, The Manual of Detection, and he talks with Geoffrey H. Goodwin at The Mumpsimus. He also gets a nice review from Thomas Jones in the London Review of Books.

PEN America 10 includes a poem by Kyi Maung Than called “Deeperinga,” which is the ancient name for Depeyin, in Burma, where Aung San Suu Kyi -- a leader of the National League for Democracy -- and her motorcade were ambushed in 2003. Now, as PEN America contributor George Packer notes, she has suffered a very different kind of ambush, one that may have been well-meaning, but which has nonetheless resulted for her in a stay at Insein Prison, a new trial, and the likely renewal of her current six-year house arrest.

PEN on YouTube

PEN American Center now has a page on YouTube. There you'll find Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo talking about freedom of expression in his country, Sam Shepard reading from his notebooks, Sufjan Stevens performing solo on the piano-- and much more, including this magnificently eloquent speech by Toni Morrison, delivered at the PEN gala last year:

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.)

Beyond Margins, Brooklyn, Obama, etc.

Jane Ciabattari, president of the NBCC and PEN Member, has written an excellent recap of "Beyond Margins: The Critical Perspective," held in connection with the PEN Beyond Margins Awards.

Those PEN podcasts from the Brooklyn Book Festival, mentioned here a few weeks back, have gone online.

The Somali-Speaking Center of International PEN is holding a literary festival, "The Word and the Way to a Better World," in London.

Amitava Kumar and Chad Post have nice things to say about the new issue. Chad particularly enjoys the conversations-- a couple of which I've mentioned before. One I've not yet mentioned features Ian McEwan and Steven Pinker, and was recently noticed by www.IanMcEwan.com.

And the Literary Saloon flags this article in which McCain and Obama are each asked to name a favorite book. They both choose novels: Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Toni Morrison's The Song of Solomon, respectively. Morrison expressed her own admiration for Obama back in January, and Obama has discussed his literary side before. In fact, the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín recently compared him to James Baldwin. (Image above via the New Pages blog.)

Notes before the deluge

World Voices kicks off today, with five events, from “Crisis Darfur” with Mia Farrow and Bernard Henri-Levy (co-sponsored by Guernica) to the “Literary Film Feast” (not “fest,” apparently) co-presented by Ratapallax. Then: seven events on Wednesday, twenty-four (!) events on Thursday, fourteen events on Friday…

So, before I (very happily) lose myself in the rushing literary waters, a few notes:

The recipients of this year’s PEN awards have been announced. Among the winners: Cynthia Ozick, Sarah Ruhl, Kimiko Hahn, Dalia Sofer, and many more…

The indispensable Complete Review flags this piece from the Lebanese Daily Star about The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in Iran—which has just issued a statement that writers wishing to be published in Iran must censor themselves. As it happens, we have a great short piece by Iranian novelist and story-writer Shahriar Mandanipour about just this sort of thing in PEN America 8.

A choose-your-own-adventure story from Mohsin Hamid (via Amitava).

Lastly, the PEN gala was last night, and I’ll try to flag some coverage of it later. Toni Morrison gave a stirring acceptance speech for the PEN/Borders Literary Service Award, and a wonderful Iraqi translator who goes by the pseudonym Ahmed Ali spoke movingly about fleeing Iraq and re-locating, eventually, to Atlanta, with the help of PEN’s Larry Siems. There was also a heartbreaking video tribute to this year’s PEN/Barbarba Goldsmith Freedom to Write honoree, Yang Tongyan, who is currently incarcerated in China.

Though not quite so important, another satisfying part of the evening was hearing nice things about the journal from Nathan Englander (who raved about the Etgar Keret stories and the George Saunders piece) and Gary Shteyngart (who described it as “muy caliente”) and Sidney Offit (who praised the Grace Paley tribute), among others. If you haven’t already, check it out (or just subscribe).

Update: Coverage of the gala here, here, here, and here.

How Chinua Achebe is like Barack Obama

At Tuesday evening's sold-out tribute to Chinua Achebe, celebrating the 50th birthday of Things Fall Apart, Edwige Danticat (pictured left, afterwards, with Ha Jin) began by explaining why she liked Achebe before she'd ever read his books. "I loved his name," she said. "He seemed like family-- he has a strange name, too. Now I say that," she added, "about Barack Obama." (Big round of applause.)

Chimamanda Adichie also spoke of seeing herself in Achebe and his work. Her first stories, she said, which she wrote when she a small girl, were about "English children with blue eyes who ate apples, played in the snow, and had dogs named Socks." She hadn't learned, she said, that "people like me could exist in books." Achebe taught her that.

Chris Abani was drawn to Achebe for a different reason: to pick up girls. His older brother's "shtick for getting girls," he said, was to quote Achebe. And so Abani, looking for tips, read Things Fall Apart-- the first book he had read by an African writer, after spending his youth devouring everything from "The Silver Surfer to Dostoevsky."

Colum McCann read the Yeats poem "The Second Coming," from which Achebe got his title; Suheir Hammad performed one of her own poems; Ha Jin spoke about being a "migrant writer in the English language," and said that Achebe worked to "extend the frontier" of English through his "mastery of the language." Toni Morrison read some of Achebe's words on that subject-- out of an anthology she put together in the late '60s for high school classrooms (which, she noted ruefully, made it into very few classrooms).

Finally, Achebe himself took the stage, after an introduction from Leon Bottstein. He said that Things Fall Apart "wrote me," and then told an amazing story about sending his manuscript of the novel-- the only one he had!-- to England so that it could be professionally typed. He only got it back with the help of an English woman he knew in Nigeria. When asked what he would have done if it had been lost, he said, with dry, dark humor, "Probably the same thing that Okonkwo did."

Other reports on the evening here, here, and here.

PS. Remko Caprio raises some challenging points in the comments (scroll down), and has the most thorough overview of the evening I've seen over at his own site.

Things Fall Apart, fifty years later

Mark Sarvas points to this excellent article about Chinua Achebe and his landmark novel, Things Fall Apart, which recently turned fifty. The article discusses, among other things, the influence of the novel on writers who came after Achebe:

One of the most celebrated young Nigerian writers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, says that she read Things Fall Apart when she was around 8 and has periodically reread it. "I find that I liked the same things each time - the familiarity with it. I hadn't realized that people like me could be in a book," she explains.

Countless others have cited Achebe, from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who once called "Things Fall Apart," a "major education" for me, to Ha Jin, a Chinese-American novelist. Achebe himself recalls some letters he received about a decade ago from students at a women's college in South Korea.

As it happens, all three of these writers-- Adichie, Toni Morrison, and Ha Jin-- will be at the PEN tribute to Achebe taking place a week from today at Town Hall in New York. They'll be joined by Chris Abani, Michael Cunningham, Edwidge Danticat, Suheir Hammad, and Colum McCann. The evening will also feature a special performance by the Francesca Harper Dance Project with dancers from the Alvin Ailey School. And there are still a few tickets available.