“Our Society Will Be A Free Society”

PEN has joined forces with The Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Sans Frontières, Index on Censorship, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, and the International Publishers Association for “Our Society Will Be A Free Society,” a campaign to free writers imprisoned in Iran after last year’s disputed presidential election there.

The campaign was named for a pledge the Ayatollah Khomenei made during the 1979 Iranian revolution to protect freedom of expression, a promise that has not been kept. The Iranian-Canadian journalist and documentary filmmaker Maziar Bahari helped kick off the campaign with an op-ed in The International Herald Tribune, which describes his experience after being arrested last year:

Your government had issued me a press card. But I was coerced to make a false televised confession admitting that I was acting as an agent of evil Western media. I was forced to say the media are trying to overthrow the Islamic government. I was beaten and threatened with execution to make that confession. I was beaten again after the show because I did not perform as well as my interrogator would have liked. Yes, Ayatollah Khamenei, I had to apologize to you on television to stop my torturer from punching me in the head.

Before last year’s election, the Iranian novelist Shahriar Mandanipour called attention to the restrictions on freedom of expression in his country with a novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story. (That novel grew out of a story he describes in the essay “The Life of a Word,” published in PEN America 8: Making Histories.)

Mandanipour’s novel was praised last month on the blog of The New York Review of Books by Claire Messud. Censoring an Iranian Love Story, she notes, “is not only directly concerned with contemporary Iran... it is also playfully engaged with Persian literary history, and at the same time, is formally innovative: the influences of Calvino and Kafka are evident in his ironic narrator’s metafictional banter.”

In other news about free expression—and the lack thereof—PEN president Anthony Appiah has expressed his profound disappointment—though not surprise—at the news that the Chinese government has rejected the appeal of Liu Xiaobo's 11-year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power”:

Liu Xiaobo’s three words to the court—‘I am innocent’—stand as an unanswered indictment of the system that condemned him; they will echo in China and around the world until he is released.

Translate these books

The latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation includes a wonderful feature called “Translate This Book!” The editors talked to “some of the top translators into English working today,” to “publishers big and small,” to “agents, journalists, and foreign-language authors,” and then compiled their thoughts on “the best books that still aren’t in English.” It's a great list, with illuminating commentary from those surveyed. Here’s Enrique Vila-Matas on a book by Rodrigo Fresán (whose very funny conversation with Jonathan Lethem ran in PEN America 8: Making Histories, along with part of Fresán's novel Kensington Gardens):

In El fondo del cielo (The Bottom of the Sky), Fresán writes the book that will come immediately after the era of apocalyptic books—the era that began with the Bible and the Aeneid, and culminated with postmodern books about the end of all possible worlds. It’s the book of the future, the book that begins to write itself when everything has ended: the story of two young people in love with planets, and of a disturbingly beautiful girl. Between Bioy Casares and Philip K. Dick, but with a voice all its own, it is both powerful and artistic.

Check out the rest.

As the eagle-eyed (and long-memoried) M.A. Orthofer points out, we did something similar in PEN America 2: Home and Away, asking members of PEN “What great books have never been translated into English?” We got great responses from Ariel Dorfman, Lily Tuck, Harry Mathews, Geoffrey O’Brien, and many others. (Dorfman, by the way, managed to sneak in another recommendation in our latest forum: Ayer ya es maňana, or Yesterday Is Already Tomorrow, by Eduardo Vladimiroff).

That forum led to PEN Recommends, an updated feature on the PEN website which lists books not yet translated into English.

Orthofer also flagged a response to the same question by the translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in an interview for The Millions by Anna Clark. Surprisingly, Pevear and Volokhonsky—best known for their translations of Anna Karenina and other Russian classics—did not focus on Russian writers in their reply, but Italian ones, singling out Alberto Savinio, Cristina Campo, and Guido Ceronetti.

And yet another reply appeared on the film blog that Richard Brody—who won the 2009 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography* for Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard—maintains for The New Yorker. In The Quarterly Conversation, Turkish writer Murat Nemet-Nejat suggested Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma. Brody seconds that suggestion before adding:

...another Godard-related book is desperately in need of translation: “En Attendant Godard” (“Waiting for Godard”), the journalist, novelist, and (later) screenwriter and director Michel Vianey’s account of accompanying Godard through the production of “Masculine Feminine,” in 1965-66. It’s the most illuminating and evocative book about movie-making I know; it came out in 1967 and has never even been reissued in France. (The author, who became a close friend of mine, died last December at the age of seventy-eight.)

* The deadline to submit a book for the 2010 award is Monday. Deadlines for other PEN awards are mostly in January. More information here.

Congrats to Colum

Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin, excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, won the National Book Award for fiction last night.

As those who come to the PEN World Voices Festival know, Colum is also a great conversationalist, and he has talked with several writers in our pages. In PEN America 8: Making Histories, he talked with Arthur Japin*, Laila Lalami, Imma Monsó, and Michael Wallner about “inventing the past” and with David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Anne Provoost, and Jeanette Winterson about “writing myth now.” Fear Itself includes not only “A Code for the Disappeared,” the piece adapted from Let the Great World Spin, but also Colum’s great conversation with Michael Ondaatje, in which Colum asked Ondaatje, “Do you have fun?”

In that conversation with Ondaatje Colum describes his job as a writer in a way that will likely resonate with those who love Let the Great World Spin:

My responsibility, I think—which I’ve learned from you and John Berger and other writers I love and admire—is to talk about the dark, anonymous corners of human experience and about the value of those dark, anonymous corners. And intersecting with those dark, anonymous corners you have these famous lives, these big desires, and big issues.

Congratulations to a wonderful writer.

(Photo of Colum McCann and Michael Ondaatje by Beowulf Sheehan.)

* Speaking of Arthur Japin, his novel Director’s Cut, narrated by a filmmaker not unlike Federico Fellini and excerpted in Making Histories, will be published by Knopf in English in February.

Our contributors elsewhere

Cynthia Ozick’s essay “Ghost Writers,” which was published in PEN America 9: Checkpoints, is in the new edition of Best American Essays.

José Rubén Zamora’s description of a raid on his house by the Guatemalan military, published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, is in the new issue of The Utne Reader.

Over at The Reading Experience, Daniel Green is disappointed by the new Tin House anthology, but praises the contribution of Lucy Corin (“the only essay in this book that makes it worth having”), whose “Seven Small Apocalypses” ran in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

Lynne Tillman, whose contribution to our forum on “make believe” has just gone online, is interviewed at The Millions.

Rabih Alameddine, whose contribution to our forum on “make believe” I mentioned on Monday, writes about The Twilight Zone, V.S. Naipaul, and creativity for The Rumpus.

On November 9, Mary Gaitskill—who contributed to the forum in PEN America 3: Tribes—will join Eric Bogosian, John Turturro, and others at the second annual benefit reading for the PEN Prison Writing Program. As an installment of WNYC’s signature series “The NEXT New York Conversation,” this event will be broadcast and live-streamed, allowing incarcerated men and women with radio and/or internet access to listen to the event and join our audience. More details here.

And there’s a free PEN event tomorrow: Salman Rushdie—who paid tribute to Ryszard Kapuściński in PEN America 8: Making Histories—will join Keith Gessen, Tanya Lokshina, and others in honoring Natalia Estemirova—the award-winning human rights activist and journalist murdered on July 15, 2009—and discussing the state of dissent and press freedom in Russia. Full details below.

Bearing Witness in Chechnya: The Legacy of Natalia Estemirova

When: Thursday, October 29
Where: Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate School, 365 Fifth Ave., NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

With Salman Rushdie, Michael Arena, Ann Cooper, Keith Gessen, Tanya Lokshina, and Elena Milashina.

Free and open to the public

Iran reading this Saturday + links

This Saturday, July 11, from 2 to 5 pm, the Bowery Poetry Club will host a free event entitled “Literatures of Resistance: An Afternoon in Solidarity with the Iranian People.” Among the readers are PEN Award-winner Dalia Sofer and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, whose writing appears in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

The following Wednesday, as previously mentioned, PEN is co-sponsoring a forum on Iran with The New York Review of Books and the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center.

The translators’ roundtable over at The Observer Translation Project has been fairly widely noted; also worth reading there is the “Letter from Chişinău,” by Moldovan journalist Leo Butnaru, about the relationship between literature and politics -- and, more specifically, the current political situation in Moldova.

And speaking of writers and politics: Liu Xiaobo was formally arrested on June 23 and charged with “inciting subversion of state power.” PEN considers this arrest “transparently abusive” and “a deeply disappointing and anachronistic denial of Liu’s right to freedom of expression under Chinese and international law.” Liu Xiaobo is one of the authors of Charter 08, calling for democratic reform in China; you can sign a petition to free him here.

And lastly, a plea for the theremin, the musical instrument that inspired Petr Zelenka’s play, which itself is about -- among other things -- the arts under communism. Part of the play appeared in PEN America 8: Making Histories, and was read, on one occasion, by Edward Albee and Sarah Ruhl.

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.

New fiction for the long weekend

The new issue of Granta is a "New Fiction Special," with work by Paul Auster, Amy Bloom, Ha Jin, and many more. Ha Jin's story, "In the Crossfire," is available online. (You can read Ha Jin's tribute to Chinua Achebe in PEN America 8: Making Histories; Paul Auster's tribute to Samuel Beckett in PEN America 5: Silences; and Amy Bloom's tribute to Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen right here on the blog.)

The issue includes a short, untitled piece by Chris Ware -- whose work is also in the new Bookforum, illustrating fiction by Holly Goddard Jones. (And for some animation by Ware, stop by VQR's blog.) Bookforum's new issue includes five other works of fiction, all with illustrations by noted graphic novelists; I'm particularly interested in this excerpt from The Cave Man by Xiaoda Xiao, "a survivor of seven years of forced labor on an island in Taihu Lake in Jiangsu province, where he served in one of Mao’s infamous prison labor-reform brigades." The illustration on the left (click to enlarge), which nods to Yeats, is by Lauren Weinstein, and accompanies fiction by Terrence Holt, introduced by Junot Díaz.

Bookforum also has an interview with Aleksandar Hemon, whose conversation with Rabih Alameddine is in PEN America 9: Checkpoints.

Lastly, the "Spring Books" issue of The Nation is out; among the many essays and reviews is this one on José Manuel Prieto's Rex, written by recent PEN honoree Natasha Wimmer. (And speaking of PEN's recent honorees, here are some highlights from speeches at Tuesday's awards ceremony.) Prieto's tribute to Gabriel García Márquez ran in PEN America 6: Metamorphoses.

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.

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.)

Monday morning news

From The New York Times:

President Obama’s 18-minute Inaugural Address on Tuesday was generally lauded by Americans for its candor and conviction. But the Chinese Communist Party apparently thought the new American president’s gilded words were a little too direct.

China Central Television, or CCTV, the main state-run network, broadcast the address live until the moment Mr. Obama mentioned “communism” in a line about the defeat of ideologies considered anathema to Americans. After the translator said “communism” in Chinese, the audio faded out even as Mr. Obama’s lips continued to move.

That same day, Edward Albee, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, and many other writers from around the world signed a letter calling for the release of Liu Xiaobo, a "prominent dissident writer, former President and current Board member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, who has been detained since December 8, 2008 for signing Charter 08, a declaration calling for political reforms and human rights. Liu Xiaobo is being held under Residential Surveillance, a form of pre-trial detention, at an undisclosed location in Beijing, and no charges against him have been made known."


Meanwhile, Amitava Kumar shares a less serious letter (pictured right; click image to enlarge), this one written by a very young Fidel Castro to FDR: "President of the United States, If you like, give me a ten dollar bill green American..." Also see the latest issue of Politics and Culture, made up of letters to Obama from academics, and Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country: Kids' Letters to President Obama, published by McSweeney's and 826 National (excerpts here).

And lastly, many thanks to the National Book Critics Circle, which has awarded PEN American Center the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award. (They also just announced the finalists for the 2008 NBCC Awards, a group that includes recent PEN America contributors Aleksandar Hemon and Marilynne Robinson.)

PEN Translation grants: applications due January 16

Note: this year (2011), the deadline for applications is February 3.


Applications for grants from the PEN Translation Fund are due one week from today. Grants range from $2,000 to $10,000 and 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.

In addition to financial assistance, grants from the PEN Translation Fund provide a good bit of publicity: recognition by the Fund has led on numerous occasions to a publishing contract. Translations supported by PEN grants have been excerpted in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review -- and, of course, in PEN America. Making Histories included a great piece from Theremin, a play by Petr Zelenka translated by Stepan Simek.

Click here to download an application.

More memoir fakery and atrocity kitsch

While putting together PEN America 8: Making Histories, we thought a lot about the way writers engage with historical fact. The smartest writers seemed to agree that narrative was never strictly factual-- that fiction creeps into any kind of storytelling. Maggie Nelson, for example, in her beautiful and brilliant memoir/book-of-poems Jane, confesses, “I don’t know what to say,” when asked by her father if the book will be “a figment of your imagination.”

A now-scuttled book that had been planned for early next year brought these matters back to mind over the holiday: Herman Rosenblat’s Holocaust memoir, Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived, was cancelled by Berkley Books after Gabriel Sherman reported serious doubts about its veracity in The New Republic. In the memoir, Rosenblat told the story-- as he has many times before, on television and elsewhere-- of “his reunion with and marriage to the girl he says helped him survive the Holocaust by bringing him apples through the fence of Schlieben, a subdivision of the Buchenwald concentration camp.”

In the commentary that followed, one of the more striking responses came from Professor Ken Waltzer, director of Michigan State University’s Jewish Studies program, who found the episode saddening in many ways, not least because of the picture Rosenblat’s story paints of the Holocaust. “Holocaust experience is not heartwarming, it is heart-rending,” Waltzer writes.

That comment reminded me of Anya Ulinich’s story “The Nurse and the Novelist,” from PEN America 9: Checkpoints. As Anya told Maud Newton recently, the story satirizes “atrocity kitsch fiction”:

What’s appealing about atrocity kitsch is that there is always a strong hero. There is also a record keeper, a paper trail, an old love letter, an old key, what have you. At the end of the story, somebody becomes stronger…. The nurse character is a curmudgeon and a nut, and her grandmother’s history is a fine example of what happens to ordinary people come times of atrocity. The weak scramble to survive when they’re in a pickle. Their weaknesses come to the fore, betrayal goes unpunished, people would rather forget, ordinary life continues in utilitarian apartments.

I suspect that Anya has a kindred spirit in Aleksandar Hemon (whose conversation with Rabih Alameddine also appears in Checkpoints), judging from his most recent book, The Lazarus Project-- which addresses, in a similarly merciless fashion, more recent atrocities: the war in Bosnia, the torture at Abu Grhaib, human trafficking in Moldova. Hemon interweaves the narrator’s experiences with and reflections on these events with a fictional account of Lazarus Averbuch, a historical figure, and the victim of his own personal atrocity. Thinking of The Lazarus Project again (with some help from Anne Yoder’s post yesterday at The Millions), a point of contact appears between the purveyors of false memoirs and atrocity kitsch, respectively. Both groups of writers exploit the wishes of many readers to see redemption in the worst the world has to offer, rather than merely facing it for what it is. This is, perhaps, its own kind of lie, the kind that has nothing to do with historical fact.

Studs Terkel on John Steinbeck, etc.

Studs Terkel died on Friday at the age of 96. A few years back, he praised John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath in PEN America 4: Fact/Fiction. He did so very much in his own fashion, finding echoes of Steinbeck in the conversation of American farmers speaking fifty years later-- such as Carl Nearmeyer, a fourth-generation farmer who, in 1989, was losing the family farm he worked twenty-three miles southeast of Des Moines:

Grapes of Wrath: “‘Sure,’ cried the tenant farmer, ‘but it’s our land. We were born on it, got killed on it, we died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours, being born on it, working on it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a piece of paper with numbers on it.’” Iowa, 1989: “There were several times I had a gun to my head. . . . and then I got damn mad. I got to thinking about it and I got madder. These people don’t have the right to do this to me. I’ve worked the land, I’ve sweated, and I’ve bled. I’ve tried to keep this place going, and they take it away from me.”

See also: an appraisal in The Chicago Tribune with remarks from Stuart Dybek.

David Lipsky, who jogged my memory below, wrote a long, excellent article for Rolling Stone about David Foster Wallace, and the whole thing is now online. (Thanks to Garth Hallberg for pointing this out.)

Sarah Weinman flags this admiring piece about the wonderful Graywolf Press. As noted below, they published one of this year's National Book Award finalists, Salvatore Scibona's The End.

Milton Hatoum, a Brazilian writer of Lebanese descent, dismantles the simplistic, "Clash of Civilizations" view of East and West over at Words Without Borders. You can read his take on myth and magical realism in PEN America 8: Making Histories.

Afternoon update: On Thursday, November 6, rallies will be held around the world for Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, better known as Kareem Amer, who published "critical writings about Islam and Egypt's highest religious authorities" on his personal blog.

In February 2007, Amer was found guilty of "disparaging Islam" and "defaming the Egyptian president" and sentenced to four years in prison. He is the first blogger in Egypt to be tried and convicted for his work, and "there are fears that this case may set a precedent."

PEN will hold a rally in New York, from noon to 1:30pm, at the Egyptian Mission to the UN (304 East 44th St., between 1st and 2nd Avenues). If you can't make it, and if you have your own blog, consider reading up on him yourself, and sharing your own thoughts November 6, as an expression of support.

NBA fiction finalists in PEN America

Congratulations to this year's National Book Awards finalists. It's great to see Aleksandar Hemon on the list for The Lazarus Project, a book mentioned on this blog before. One of the highlights of PEN America 9 is a conversation between Hemon and Rabih Alameddine. Hemon and Alameddine are friends and have a great comic rapport, which came across in person and survives on the page. The conversation is not online, so you'll have to order the issue to read it. Here’s a snippet (they're discussing Alameddine's 2008 novel, The Hakawati):

HEMON: There are a certain group of writers—and you would call them intellectuals if you were drunk—who suddenly took up the banner of Western civilization, defending it from Islamists and Islamic fascists, which is just about anybody who is not part of the crowd. Is this book a repudiation of their position—

ALAMEDDINE: What do you think?

HEMON: —and if so in what way?

ALAMEDDINE: I hope in a very subtle way. The book is not a repudiation, actually. It is a changing of the subject. The book started a bit earlier, but I was hit at a particular point—when George Bush said "They hate our freedoms."

Marilynne Robinson, an NBA finalist for Home, appeared in PEN America 8: Making Histories, with some remarks about memory and amnesia in Iowa, very apropos of her new novel. She also appeared in PEN America 2: Home and Away, paying tribute to Proust.

The other finalists for fiction are Rachel Kushner for Telex from Cuba, Peter Matthiessen, for Shadow Country, and Salvatore Scibona, for The End. (While I haven’t read any of these, I did hear Scibona, an acquaintance, read part of his novel at a Happy Endings reading, and the section he read, at least, was terrific.)

On the subject of literary awards, here's a (somewhat belated) link to a piece about Nobel Prize secretary Horace Engdahl’s comment that “Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States.” This particular piece has very sane responses by Edward Albee, Junot Díaz, and the current president of PEN American Center, Francine Prose. It’s true, as Engdahl noted, that more literary translations should be published in the United States. But the notion that the literary world has one geographical center seems dubious, to say the least. I certainly didn't get that feeling at this year's World Voices festival.

Friday morning links

The literary magazine Opium is “putting together a series of quotes about what authors have learned from other authors (or other sources)—something another writer once said to you that's really stuck in your head and encouraged or influenced your work.” For instance: “The secret of making [art] is simple: Discard everything that is good enough” (James Salter). If you've got one, send an email to opiumwritersexperiment@gmail.com. (Via the NewPages blog.)

Michael Emmerich and Daniela Harezanu have a terrific exchange on a subject of personal importance: the editing of translations. (Via Three Percent.)

Andrew Saikali flags a story on censorship in Iran, a subject you can read more about in PEN America 8: Making Histories.

And PEN is going to court to challenge the new surveillance law.

(The photo above is an oldie but goodie from Amitava Kumar's blog: his daughter in a Susan Sontag t-shirt made out of The New York Times.)

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 on a Wednesday

After discovering that Barack Obama is a fan of Philip Roth (and David Grossman), Jeffrey Goldberg asked readers for "a couple of paragraphs describing what a Philip Roth-influenced Obama White House would look like." And he's picked a couple of winners.

Rumbles have been brewing in the usually peaceful worlds of literary magazines and literary translation. I'm looking forward to the "mini-manifesto" from VQR editor Ted Genoways.

I'm also looking forward to Franzen's answer.

Our editor, M Mark, is headed to Jamaica this week to participate in the Calabash Literary Festival, which aims to "transform the literary arts in the Caribbean." She'll be joining PEN America 8 contributor Chris Abani, among other great authors, and will be featured on a panel about editing collections.

And the PEN Literary Awards ceremony was a treat. PEN.org should have audio soon. (Photo below by Beowulf Sheehan; that's Jonathan Ames among the winners.)

David Grossman on Israel and Myth

PEN America 8 features a conversation about re-writing myth called “In the Beginning,” with David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Anne Provoost, and Jeanette Winterson, moderated by Colum McCann. Early on, Grossman (pictured left, in a portrait by Beowulf Sheehan) tells a wonderful story:

Many years ago, when I put my eldest son to bed, I told him, “This is the longest night of the year.” It was the 21st of December. At first light the next day he burst into our room, covered with sweat, and shouted, “Dad, Mom, it’s over! This night is over!” He was like Adam, the first man on Earth, wandering through an endless night, not knowing if the sun would rise again—and how relieved he must have been when the sun rose. The year after that, he told his younger brother, “This is going to be the longest night of the year”—and he said it with an air of indifference. He had found shelter in science and empirical experience. I could not help thinking of him as exiled from the primal, the more loaded feelings one has without this buffering shell, this armor of science and knowledge.

I am sure that my child will eventually look, as we are all looking, for this primal night, when we wandered alone. We look for it in legends, in stories, in myths.

Grossman told this story in April 2006. A few months later, the younger son in the story was killed in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, three days after Grossman—along with Amoz Oz and A.B. Yehosua—held a press conference calling for a cease-fire. Uri Grossman was in a tank struck by a Hezbollah missile.

Grossman spoke of his son’s death in his Freedom to Write Lecture, delivered one year after the conversation quoted above (both events were part of the World Voices festival). I thought of it again while reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s cover story in the current Atlantic Monthly, which divulges that Grossman has finished a novel “about an Israeli soldier, a tank commander, who goes to a big military operation,” and whose “mother has a kind of premonition that he’s going to be killed.” She refuses to “be at home when the army comes to announce the death of her son,” so she “starts a walk across Israel… and she tells the story of her son’s life.” Grossman started writing the novel just before Uri began his military service. According to Goldberg, the novel will be published in Israel this spring, and Goldberg believes it “could have a seismic effect on Israelis, who have, in their 60th year of independence, grown tired of losing their sons to war.”

(Also at The Atlantic, Goldberg interviews Barack Obama, who says that he can “remember reading The Yellow Wind [Grossman’s “exposé of the occupation and its demoralizing effects on Palestinians, and on the Israelis who enforced it”] when it came out,” and that his “intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Whether it was theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris.”)