PEN Reads starts today + other links

PEN Reads has begun with this short essay by Colm Tóibín. Check it out and weigh in with your own thoughts. And if you haven’t already, get a copy of The Hour of the Star and stay tuned to PEN.org/PENReads for more in the weeks ahead. (It’s a short book so you needn’t worry too much about falling behind—or resort to watching the movie... though apparently it’s pretty good?)

The Rumpus also has a book club and until Friday they’re giving away free books.

Also via The Rumpus: Etgar Keret (beloved contributor to PEN America) describes for the online magazine Tablet his practice of writing fake dedications. When “a total stranger” asks you to sign a book, he says, what can you write that doesn't sound smarmy or false? Which leads him to this conclusion: “If the books themselves are pure fiction, why should the dedications be true?” One book he inscribes: “To Avram. I don’t care what the lab tests show. For me, you’ll always be my dad.” And in another, which someone has asked him to sign for his girlfriend, Keret writes: “Bosmat, though you’re with another guy now, we both know you’ll come back to me in the end.”

Keret’s countryman and fellow short-short story writer Alex Epstein has just published in the United States a collection of his really wonderful stories (translated by Becka Mara McKay)—ten of which were featured in PEN America 12: Correspondences. Words Without Borders has both a review of the book and a video interview with Epstein. He participated in the PEN World Voices Festival this year, so you can also watch him converse with Norman Rush, Claire Messud, et al; listen to him discuss the short story with Aleksandar Hemon, Yiyun Li, and others; and hear him participate in the PEN Translation Slam.

And you can read the stories we published in PEN America 12: Correspondences. Here’s the shortest one:

THE MELANCHOLY OF ANTIQUE TELEPHONES

In ’83, the horoscopes are never wrong. After ten years, she moves the rotary telephone from the living room into the bedroom. Every morning, upon waking, she lifts the receiver and listens to whispering and rustling and rattling, as at a window. Maybe this is time, suddenly returning. Maybe this is rain. Maybe this is already her mother tongue.

Read the others here.

“Words falling like little drops of arsenic in our body politic”

Barack Obama has apparently changed his mind about releasing up to 2,000 photographs of alleged abuse at American prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan; he has decided that releasing the photos might endanger American troops. One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers asks “why it is so important for the photos to be released,” since “we know that this behavior occurred,” to which Sullivan replies:

Without photos, we would never have heard of the mass abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib.... When the photos were uncovered, revealing clearly what the anodyne words “stress position,” “mock execution,” “forced nudity,” etc., actually meant, we finally were able to hold the government accountable for the abuse it authorized.

This is likely true -- but we might also start to recognize the horror in those “anodyne words.” In a conversation about torture that PEN and the ACS put together in December -- and which appears in abridged form in the new issue -- Scott Horton refers to our many euphemisms for torture (“harsh interrogation techniques” and so forth) as “words falling like little drops of arsenic in our body politic.” Consider the sworn statement we reprinted in the new issue, which we obtained from a book published by the ACLU, The Administration of Torture:

I told ______________ a story I heard in Afghanistan of a dog used during an interrogation. The dog was trained to bark on cue and would bark any time the interrogator had reason to believe the detainee was lying during the interrogation. I told him that this would probably not be allowed, but that the presence of barking dogs in the prison might be effective. I told him of a story of an interrogator using a Pride and Ego Down approach. The interrogator took a copy of a Koran and threw it on the ground and stepped on the Koran, which resulted in a detainee riot. I explained to him that an adjusted sleep schedule was used on detainees in Afghanistan. The process was closely monitored and used to disorient the detainee. Subsequently, I explained that basic approach strategies would be most effective within the first few hours of capture and that they needed to do timely interrogations. The more comfortable a detainee gets with his surroundings, the stronger his resistance becomes.

“Adjusted sleep schedule,” “basic approach strategies”: the sterile language contrasts starkly with the photos that we have already seen, and no doubt with the others possibly still to come. The language of the statement also contrasts with the plain speech of Mourad Benchellali in “Postcard from Camp X-Ray,” published, along with the sworn statement, in PEN America 10. “Postcard” is excerpted from Benchellali’s memoir, Voyage vers l’enfer (translated by Antoine Auduoard and Ruth Koral Marshall, but not yet published in English), and it describes his arrival at Guantánamo:

There are two openings in the wire mesh of my cell door. One is at hand height, the other is level with my ankles. When we’re called over for whatever reason, we’re required to stand close to the door so they can handcuff and chain us through these holes. We’re given plastic flip-flops. The guard barks. I don’t understand, but the gesture’s clear, so I huddle at the back of the cell. He slides two buckets towards me. One is filled with water, for washing. The other is for relieving ourselves. We get a toothbrush with a very short handle, and a tube of toothpaste. Then comes a thin foam mattress, a blanket, a towel. The water bucket has to stay close to the bars. The guard fills it from a hose he pushes through from the other side of the wire fencing, just as you would do for a wild beast.

Another contrast to the “anodyne words” of the sworn statement can be found in the language used by Anouar Benamalek, both in the conversation about torture and in his accompanying one-page statement, also published in the issue, entitled “To Be Human”:

The task of a writer is to repeat endlessly that the person we are torturing is a human being and that when we torture a human being we are no longer human. We must repeat again and again: To torture is not to be human. To torture is to accept disgrace for oneself and for one’s nation. The writer must repeat this again, again, and again.

We chose the title of the issue, “Fear Itself,” with the stories of Benmalek and Benchellali in mind; we did not yet know we would find echoes of their stories elsewhere in the issue -- in particular in the works of fiction by Etgar Keret (in a fable-like and more lighthearted -- but still frightening, I think -- depiction of torture) and, especially, by Rawi Hage. We adapted a piece from Hage’s novel Cockroach in the issue, and the excerpt happens to feature an Algerian professor (Benmalek taught math at the University of Algiers, and in his statement lays out the responsibilities of intellectuals, as he sees them) who is in some indistinct way connected with torture in his native country.

Each time we put together an issue, though, we find echoes and parallels that only become evident (to us, at least) after several readings; discovering them is one of the more rewarding things about working on the journal. These echoes make evident some of the ways that writers respond, however obliquely, to their circumstances, and how these writers can both reflect and illuminate our own experiences, and those of others.

See also: Mark Danner in The New York Review of Books, Gareth Peirce in The London Review of Books, the ACLU blog, and PEN's Campaign for Core Freedoms.

Conversations @ World Voices

A late addition to the World Voices schedule: new Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio will talk with Adam Gopnik on April 24. (That's Le Clezio in the AP photo on the right, with his wife Marina in 1963.) Gopnik, who will also talk with Muriel Barbery on April 30, proved himself a deft interviewer last year when speaking with Umberto Eco -- the conversation between Eco and Gopnik is in our new issue.

One-on-one conversations between writers are among my favorite festival events -- and we’ve featured several of them in PEN America: George Saunders and Etgar Keret, Aleksandar Hemon and Rabih Alameddine, Elias Khoury and Nuruddin Farah. (Our next issue features a terrific conversation between Colum McCann and Michael Ondaatje.)

This year’s festival features several intriguing pairings, perhaps none more intriguing than Enrique Vila-Matas with Paul Auster:

For years Enrique Vila-Matas and Paul Auster have been engaged in an extended literary conversation, spanning continents and several languages. And in the ingenious short story by Eduardo Lago, which borrows its title, Brooklyn Trilogy, from Auster, the two are even brought together as fictional characters. Two years ago, they met in person for the first time and discovered that they do, indeed, share many common obsessions.

For more on Vila-Matas, the place to go on the web (besides his own website) is Conversational Reading.

Other conversations I’m particularly excited about: Richard Ford talking with Nam Le (if you haven’t read any of Nam’s work, read this); Adrian Tomine with Yoshihiro Tatsumi (a great Tatsumi story appears in PEN America 10); Mark Z. Danielewski with Rick Moody; and Péter Nádas with Daniel Mendelsohn (whose long essay on Susan Sontag’s journals I hope to read soon).

See also: Music @ World Voices


PS. Other interviews and one-on-one conversations to look forward to: Nawal El Sadaawi & Anthony Appiah; Meir Shalev & Daniel Menaker; Neil Gaiman & Caro Llewellyn; David Grossman & Philip Lopate; Domenico Starnone & Antonio Monda; Sebastian Barry & Roxanne Coady.

Our next issue, and other notes

Things have gotten busy here as we finish our tenth issue. It’s going to be full of great stuff, including:

A terrific piece of fiction adapted from Colum McCann’s upcoming novel about New York in the 1970s, Let the Great World Spin, which comes out in June (and which is highlighted by a Canongate editor in a rundown of exciting new books; via Conversational Reading). By the way, you can read another adapted portion of the novel in The Paris Review.

An excerpt from the funny, smart, and heartbreaking play “Autobiography of a Terrorist,” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, whose memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free comes out this month. Read a short interview with Saïd (via Maud Newton).

New fiction by Lydia Davis, Guillermo Fadanelli, Petina Gappah, Etgar Keret, and Hari Kunzru; conversations featuring Umberto Eco, Adam Gopnik, Michael Ondaatje, and Annie Proulx; and much, much more.

Meanwhile, have a look at this article in The National about Saudi Arabian fiction, in which PEN America contributor Yousef Al-Mohaimeed is discussed at some length (via the indispensable Literary Saloon).

And, lastly, watch the complete video of our benefit reading, now up at YouTube. All the readers are terrific, in my biased opinion, but I’ll make two recommendations in particular: Edward Albee and Sarah Ruhl reading from Theremin (12 minutes in), and Nathan Englander reading George Saunders (26 minutes in). Enjoy.

More Etgar Keret

The Israeli writer and filmmaker Etgar Keret, who has attended two World Voices festivals, is a favorite of PEN America -- just last week I mentioned his conversation with George Saunders (from PEN America 8: Making Histories) after Deborah Eisenberg read a story of Etgar's (which will appear in PEN America 10) at our first-ever benefit.

Now, Words Without Borders is discussing Etgar in advance of the next Conversation on Great Contemporary Literature, which will focus on his work and feature internationally acclaimed Hebrew translator Miriam Shlesinger in conversation with prolific essayist and novelist (and cinephile) Phillip Lopate (who is on the advisory board of PEN America). The event is at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 5th, at Idlewild Books in NYC.

They'll also be hosting an online book club and are looking for readers to tell them their favorite Keret story. Send submissions to blog@wordswithoutborders.org.

And you should also read Etgar's recent contribution to The New York Times Magazine, pointed out by Maud Newton and Laila Lalami (who, like Etgar, appears in Making Histories).

(Photo above by Beowulf Sheehan.)

Benefit recap

Last night, a varied lineup of terrific writers celebrated the journal and helped us raise money to keep it going. The benefit was recorded, and I’ll link to the audio here after it becomes available. In the meantime, here’s a short recap.

After an introduction from M Mark, the journal’s editor, Francine Prose and Lydia Davis began the evening by reading translated pieces from PEN America 6: Metamorphoses: Prose read “Canned Foreign,” by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky, and Lydia Davis read “Borges and I,” by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James Irby. Both Prose and Davis are terrific readers, and they each captured the sly intelligence and wit of their respective readings.

They were followed by Edward Albee and Sarah Ruhl, who together read a comic scene from Petr Zelenka’s play Theremin that was published in PEN America 8: Making Histories. Albee introduced Ruhl as a “fine American dramatist,” then added, “I also write plays,” before launching into his spirited interpretation of Léon Sergeivich Theremin.

Albee and Ruhl were followed by Ron Chernow, who commented briefly on the PEN Prison Writing Program before reading a lyrical excerpt from “Hook Island Traveler,” by Chris Everley, which is in our most recent issue.

Nathan Englander and Deborah Eisenberg came out together -- in symbolic honor of PEN’s commitment to fostering literary fellowhip -- and read pieces by George Saunders (“Realist Fiction”) and Etgar Keret (“Rachamim and the Worm Man (An Evil Story),” which will be in issue #10), two smart and funny writers whose conversation with each other was published in Making Histories.

To close the evening, André Aciman read from “Baghdad, Damascus, Atlanta,” an essay by Ahmed Ali, and Anthony Appiah read two poems by Fady Joudah before thanking everyone for coming and making an eloquent argument for the importance of PEN’s mission and the journal’s role in forwarding it.Great thanks to all the readers and everyone who joined us.

Our contributors elsewhere

Rabih Alameddine, whose most recent book, The Hakawati, depicted -- among many other things -- the return of a Lebanese-American man to Beirut to see his dying father, contributes to the Granta series devoted to writers and their fathers. Rabih's conversation with Aleksandar Hemon ran in PEN America 9: Checkpoints, along with an excerpt from The Hakawati. In fact, their conversation was, along with Fady Joudah's poems, one of the inspirations for the issue's title:

HEMON: This idea of keeping death at bay with narration—its model is The Thousand and One Nights. And it suggests that storytelling is an affirmation of life. And I mean the basic fact of life—if you can tell stories, you are alive.

ALAMEDDINE: Yes. We are both from what I call “death on the shoulder” cultures. Many of my relatives saved themselves by entertaining people with guns. You get stopped at checkpoints; one cousin of mine knew she was going to die so she started talking to them. “I grew up in such and such a village,” and so on. She started telling her story very quickly—and they let her pass.

Continuing on this theme: The New York Times book blog Paper Cuts recently suggested a reading list devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and, over at the VQR blog, Michael Lukas suggests some literary additions, including books by PEN America contributors Etgar Keret, David Grossman, and Mahmoud Darwish.

And in the Guardian, Pankaj Mishra seconds the Grossman recommendation. You can read Grossman's Freedom to Write lecture, from the 2007 World Voices Festival, here.

(Photo of Alameddine, above, by Beowulf Sheehan.)

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.)

On other blogs

The Words Without Borders Book Clubs are back, with a new one devoted to Robert Walser's The Assistant, translated by Susan Bernofsky with a little bit of help from PEN.

Also, the great Luc Sante, who contributed the photograph we used to adorn Etgar Keret's story "Myth Milk" in PEN America 8, has contributed a short piece (with songs) to the wonderful MP3 blog Moistworks, which is connected in some way to the excellent literary magazine Open City.

Sante's own blog, from which the illustration above is taken, is also not to be missed.

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.

Etgar Keret on grammar and hard-ons

Among the riches of PEN America 8 (shortly headed to the printer; subscribe here) is a conversation between George Saunders and Etgar Keret (pictured left in a photo from Time magazine available on Etgar's website). Both writers are smart and hilarious, and they don't disappoint.

The conversation is prefaced by a short, shrewd essay by Saunders and an explosive little Keret story from The Girl on the Fridge (out from FSG in May). It's followed by an older Keret story, "Rabin's Dead."

Here's how the conversation begins:

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I was amazed by your stories, by the quality and quantity of imagination, and the unbelievable overflow of ideas. So I wanted to ask a question that’s probably unfair. Can you pick a story, and talk us through the process—where the seed of the idea was, and how you arrived at the finished story?

ETGAR KERET: Well, there’s one story, I’m not sure I know its name in English correctly. I think it’s “Actually, I Do Have Hard-Ons Lately”? Something like that?

SAUNDERS: Oh yeah. It’s “The Quality of My Hard-Ons is Very Excellent Lately,” I think.

AUDIENCE: “Actually, I’ve Had Some Phenomenal Hard-Ons Lately.”

KERET: That’s it. With that story I can tell you something about the process. I was sitting in a café and somebody with a cell phone at a table nearby said that sentence. He really said, “Actually, I’ve had some phenomenal hard-ons lately.” I looked at him, and he asked for a beer, and then I left. And I kept saying to people I knew, “I was sitting next to this guy, and he said this sentence.” And they’d say, “Um, okay.” And I’d say, “No, no! I really feel that there is something in this sentence, something in the grammar of it.” If he hadn’t said the “actually,” say, it would have been a different sentence, you know?

So I tried to invent this guy in my head. And the first thing that came to mind was that he had an affair with a woman at work. And what makes him feel best about this affair is that whenever they go to dinner, he can ask for the receipt, and it’s tax-deductible because she works with him. So he can cheat on his wife and on the IRS at the same time.

SAUNDERS: Incredible aphrodisiac.

Etgar is coming back to the World Voices festival this year, and you can read more about him here.