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.)

Inaugural poets

Via Ted Genoways at the VQR blog, an interesting post by Mike Chasar on Robert Frost’s reading at JFK’s inauguration (a post that draws on an excellent online feature about Frost in VQR from a few weeks ago). Chasar’s post is inspired by Elizabeth Alexander’s impending appearance at the Obama inauguration.

PEN America 7: World Voices features a terrific talk by Alexander on “the relationship of African writers and Africa at large to American writing,” along with two of her poems. The first of these, “The African Picnic,” begins like so:

World Cup finals, France v. Brasil.
We gather in Gideon’s yard and grill.
The TV sits in the bright sunshine.
We want Brasil but Brasil won’t win.
Aden waves a desultory green and yellow flag.
From the East to the West to the West to the East
we scatter and settle and scatter some more.
Through the window, Mama watches from the cool indoors.

Obama, by the way, is only the third president to have an inaugural poet: Kennedy selected Frost, Clinton invited Maya Angelou and Miller Williams (whose daughter Lucinda is also a pretty good writer), respectively, to his two inaugurations, and now Obama has invited Elizabeth Alexander.

(Photo above by George Silk, and taken from Life magazine’s excellent online photo archive.)

PS. Also on the VQR blog, Ted Genoways selects his top ten 2008 poetry collections, a list that includes The Earth in the Attic, by Fady Joudah.

Fact, fiction, and Ryszard Kapuściński

Over at Three Percent, Chad Post has some complaints about a review of The Rebels’ Hour, by Lieve Joris. The book is categorized as history, but includes an unusual note: “the facts in this book have all been researched in minute detail, but in order to paint a realistic picture of my characters I’ve had to fill in some parts of their lives from my own imagination. It was the only way to make the story both particular and general.”

Which got me thinking, once again, about Ryszard Kapuściński—who, as I mentioned before, looms large in PEN America 8. (As a participant in the first World Voices festival, in 2005, he also appears in PEN America 7, which is devoted to that event). Following his death, on January 23, 2007, a tribute was organized for the World Voices festival that April. Lawrence Weschler moderated the event, which also included Breyten Breytenbach, Carolin Emcke, Philip Gourevitch, Adam Michnik, and Salman Rushdie.

After we had settled on “Making Histories” as the theme, we knew that some of these tributes would end up in the issue (ultimately, the ones by Rushdie, Gourevitch, and Emcke). Kapuściński’s last book to appear in English, after all, was Travels with Herodotus, a meditation on the “father of history” and on Kapuściński’s own experiences traveling the world, recording what he saw. PEN America 8 ended up featuring an excerpt from that book, in which Kapuściński considers the stated purpose of Herodotus’s Histories: “to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time.”

He pops up elsewhere in the issue, too: In “Voyage and Voyeur,” Paul Holdengräber quotes Kapuściński, leading to this exchange between Ilija Trojanow and Alain de Botton. In “Imaginary Geographies,” Daniel Alarcón cites The Emperor as one of the most imaginatively constructed books he’s ever read. Perhaps his then-recent death had sent everyone back to his books, but for whatever reason, Kapuściński kept inspiring conversations.

Which brings me back to Joris. For one aspect of Kapuściński’s work that has long inspired conversation is the occasional fiction in his otherwise nonfiction books. Rushdie mentions this in his piece, and he and Lawrence Wechsler expanded on the subject for VQR. (Neither of them gets nearly as angry about it as Jack Shafer did.) Kapuściński’s books are presented as reportage, and we expect facts in that genre. But it seems crazy (and, perhaps, distinctly American) to damn his work generally on this account. Perhaps some of his books—like The Emperor, which famously re-imagines Hailie Selassie’s death—should carry a note not unlike that in the Joris book?

(See also: Nick Owchar heralds the otherwise unheralded collection of poems by Kapuściński just published in English. The photo above, by the way, is yet another of the entries in the Public Lives/Private Lives mixed media project.)

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.)

"The Most Famous Unknown Writer of the 20th Century"

That’s how writer and critic Luc Sante once described Georges Simenon, who died 18 years ago today. Sante affixed that label to the prolific Belgian author back in 2005, at the first PEN World Voices festival. Since then, NYRB Classics has published five more of Simenon’s novels in English translation, to go along with the three they published in 2003 and 2004. Those books have garnered reviews in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, and elsewhere. It seems this "unknown writer" is becoming more famous-- in the US, that is-- each year.

Sante had much else to say of interest in his talk, which was published in our seventh issue. “Somewhere along the line,” Sante writes, Simenon “made a signal discovery”:

Much of what passes for literature merely consists of studies of people in their clothing—that is, people operating within the rigid confines of social codes. He, on the other hand, wanted to write about the naked human, who is forced by circumstances to confront life without the usual protections. Those same social codes made him an outsider and kept him one, even at the height of his fame. He had served his apprenticeship writing pulp fiction and had cemented his reputation with detective novels. Furthermore, he was Belgian. He also lacked a writing style detectable by the belletristic apparatus of the prewar era. Therefore, he was forever barred from being accepted as a man of letters by the people in Paris who decided such things.

In the wake of Flaubert and subsequent adherents to le mot juste, Simenon may also have hurt his case for a literary reputation-- among "the people in Paris who decided such things," that is-- with his prodigious productivity: He wrote over 400 books, some published under pseudonyms.

Given that enormous output, where should a newcomer to Simenon begin? Sante mentions Dirty Snow (“a supremely bleak evocation of the horrors of the Second World War… that can be usefully compared with the works that Sartre and Camus were issuing at the same time”) and Pedigree (“an autobiographical novel of his youth… which achieves an epic grandeur of thought and a beaverish accumulation of mundane details”).

This month, however, one could do worse than reading The Engagement along with the good folks at Words Without Borders, who are hosting an ongoing, online discussion of the 135-page mystery on their blog, as part of their “Reading the World” series. The discussion will be led by Chad Post, of Three Percent (“a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester”), and Mark Binelli, the author of Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! They'll be joined by the book’s translator, Anna Moschovakis, and others.

For more, watch this site.

(And for more of Sante's thoughts on Simenon, check out his long Bookforum piece from January.)

Inappropriate Appropriation

The new Believer has just appeared, providing us the opportunity to remember “Inappropriate Appropriation,” a “nighttime event” put together by the Believer in concert with PEN American Center for the first annual PEN World Voices Festival, held in New York in the spring of 2005. The event was recorded, and a carefully edited transcript appeared in PEN America 7, which was devoted to that festival.

The event convened several writers to consider “the rules of cross-cultural appropriation,” as moderator Rick Moody puts it, noting that these rules seemed lately to have “loosened up a bit.” But Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie suggests that, while literature should have no “rules,” great “sensitivity” is still required to write about others. She recalls “a little blurb on the cover” of a book by Ryszard Kapuscinski “that described it as the greatest intelligence to bear on Africa since Conrad. And I really was insulted by that,” she says, “because it isn’t the greatest intelligence to bear on Africa, and I didn’t think, by the way, that Conrad was particularly writing Africa as Africa was.”

Read the rest.