Our contributors elsewhere

Two of my favorite literary conversationalists, Aleksandar Hemon and Colum McCann, talk with each other in this month’s Believer. (McCann used a line from Hemon’s The Lazarus Project as the epigraph for his National Book Award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin, which was excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.)

AH: Here is the news, Mr. McCann: novels do not solve problems, though ideally they cause some. And if a Katrina novel would be a noble effort, that does not mean it would be any good—and if it is not good, then the pain and suffering and humiliation would have been misused for a literary tryout. You don’t practice your craft on other people’s tragedy.... published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.

CM: But I’ve never even dreamt that novels can solve problems. If they could we’d have no problems, or more likely no novels. And you’re right, the Guantánamo novel will probably take twenty years. But here is the flipside of the news: Stories have to be told over and over again, lest we forget them. Here, I think you make a mistake. You’re assuming once told is always told. Which I fear is the problem of how history is presented.

Hemon’s line about “other people’s tragedy” (and even his specific example of “a Katrina novel”) reminded me of Anya Ulinich’s story “The Nurse and the Novelist,” which appeared in PEN America 9: Checkpoints and prompted considerable discussion. (His remarks elsewhere in the conversation echo his contribution to our latest forum.)

And Colum’s reply called to mind his recent op-ed in The New York Times (where Hemon, too, has occasionally appeared), about the way fiction can shape our ideas about history: “Kennedy and Johnson traipse along feeling the weight of the things they have carried, and Bill Clinton sounds out the saxophone alongside the white noise.”

Fellow PEN America contributor Lydia Davis also showed up on the op-ed page of the Times recently, with a piece called “Everyone Is Invited,” published on Christmas Eve. Davis also conversed publicly not long ago, participating in a live chat on the website of The New Yorker. One reader asked about her story “Jury Duty,” and got this illuminating reply: “I don’t think too much before I plunge in and write the story. I knew I wanted to write about my experience of it, and then I found the form—David Foster Wallace’s question and answer, with the question blank.”

Lastly, a transcript of the recent PEN event honoring Natalia Estemirova is now online at HELO magazine, for those who couldn't be there.

P.S. As another update to the posts below, see this post on The Daily Beast about the New Year’s Eve rally for Liu Xiaobo, featuring a transcript of E.L. Doctorow’s closing remarks about what happens when a nation’s “poets and writers and artists, its thinkers and intellectuals, are muzzled in silence.”

Our contributors elsewhere

FSG’s fall catalog, which just arrived in the mail, is accompanied by a separately printed pamphlet announcing The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, to appear in October, and rightly hailed by FSG as “an event in American letters.” A new story by Davis, called “The Landing,” will appear in our upcoming issue. In the meantime, read Davis’s tribute to Marcel Proust, from PA 2: Home and Away, or check out PA 7: World Voices, to see how Jonathan Franzen approaches the question “Does Writing Change Anything?” through two of Davis’s stories. (You can also watch Davis read Borges on PEN's YouTube channel.)

Other happy inclusions in the FSG catalog: If I Were Another, a book of poems by Mahmoud Darwish translated by Fady Joudah (both Darwish and Joudah appear in PA 9: Checkpoints), and Interesting Times, a collection of essays by George Packer (another Checkpoints contributor).

Lastly, “Teenager,” by Wislawa Szymborska, is the second in the new online series from Granta “showcasing important contemporary poets.” A portion of Szymborska’s Nonrequired Reading ran in PA 5: Silences.

(Drawing above of Lydia Davis by Tony Millionaire; taken from this interview of Davis by Sarah Manguso, conducted for The Believer.)

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.

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.

A few Friday notes

Some matters of interest as we finish correcting the proofs on our next issue:

* A newly translated interview with Borges:

My father showed me his library, which seemed to me infinite, and he told me to read whatever I wanted, but that if something bored me I should put it down immediately, that is, the opposite of obligatory reading.

Tributes to Borges from Paul Auster and others can be found in PEN America 1: Classics.

* One of Lydia Davis's stories, provided in full by Amitava Kumar:

Happiest Moment

If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

Davis paid tribute to Proust (whom she has translated) in PEN America 2: Home & Away

Lastly, Open Letter continues to keep track of all the works of literary translation being published in the US this year. First up this time out: The Executor: A Comedy of Letters, by Michael Krüger, "about a literary executor who has to go through the papers of the recently deceased Rudolf, a scam of an academic who, nevertheless, leaves behind a unpublished masterpiece that will change the future of literature." This is the second of Krüger's novels to appear in English; Andrew Shields was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize for translating The Cello Player, which was the first.

Michael Ondaatje; Davis on Proust; "Urban Virgins"

Amitava Kumar describes Michael Ondaatje’s visit to Vassar, where he delivered the annual William Gifford lecture and told students, “What I love about English is that it is revived every fifty years by someone who is not English”—for example, G.V. Desani, with his novel All About H. Haterr. Also check out Ondaatje’s conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in PEN America 7.

This Space calls attention to The Cahiers Series from Sylph Editions, the fifth installment of which will have three linked pieces by Lydia Davis.

First is 'A Proust Alphabet', which gives an account of several words and issues of particular interest, encountered during the author’s recent translating of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. There follows a short article on the French thinker and novelist Maurice Blanchot, entitled 'The Problem in Summarising Blanchot'. Finally comes a series of dreams and dreamlike moments, recounted in 'Swimming in Egypt: Dreams while Awake and Asleep'. The cahier is accompanied by photographs by Ornan Rotem.

The cahier comes out in a month; in the meantime, you can read Davis’s thoughts on Proust in PEN America 2.

Lastly, as if the new Latin America issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review was not impressive enough on its own, they have also created some fanastic web features, like this interactive map which links to various pieces from the issue-- or this collection of photographs and poetry:

“Urban Virgins” shows a series of paintings by Ana de Orbegoso paired with poems by Odi Gonzales. De Orbegoso has created 5′ tall wearable Spanish paintings of saints and virgins that have been mashed up with photographs of contemporary Peruvian women. Then she has people walk around Cusco, Peru in these costumes, bringing art to the streets.

(And speaking of Latin America, here’s yet another November event: The News from Latin America, hosted by the Overseas Press Club and the National Book Critics Circle, featuring Francisco Goldman, George de Lama, and Peter Kinoy, and hosted by Calvin Sims.)

Wednesday Miscellany: Proust, etc.

Edmund White lists five novels “reviewers should have in their libraries” for the “Critical Library" series over at the NBCC blog. Among them: In Search of Lost Time, which he has read thrice (!), the first time in high school (!, again). For more of White's thoughts on Proust, check out PEN America 2: Home & Away, and his piece, “The Consolations of Art”:

Of course Proust is also popular because he wrote about glamour, rich people, nobles, artists. And he wrote about love. It doesn’t seem to matter that he came to despise love, that he exploded it, reduced it to its shabbiest, most mechanical, even hydraulic terms. By which I mean he not only demystified love, he also dehumanized it, turning it into something merely Pavlovian. The love Swann feels for Odette is in no way a tribute to her charms or her soul.

Seems a bit less cheery than Alain de Botton's version. (Among the other writers who consider Proust in PEN America 2: Marilynne Robinson, Lydia Davis, Nadine Gordimer... check it out. And for a lighter-- and very amusing-- take on reading Proust, try Barnaby Sandwich.)

That discussion of “the place of the political in poetry” that Ted Genoways called for last week-- and which is mentioned below-- elicited some interesting remarks, both at the VQR blog and at The Chronicle of Higher Education. As part of the discussion, Don Share, senior editor of Poetry, called attention to this piece by Nathaniel Fick about “recent war poetry.”

As others have noted, the 2007 MacArthur “Genius” Grants were announced this week, and three members of PEN were among the recipients: fiction writer Stuart Dybek, playwright Lynn Nottage, and editor Peter Cole.

The New York Times ran a profile yesterday of “two leading Brazilian novelists of Amazon themes”: Márcio Souza and Milton Hatoum.

Mid-day update: PEN and The Campaign for Reader Privacy applaud "the introduction today of legislation to safeguard the privacy of ordinary Americans and curb the FBI’s abuse of the National Security Letter power granted under the USA Patriot Act." Read more.