Festival highlight: Opening Night

Most World Voices events are free, but a few do cost money and require tickets—which often sell out.

Among these is the opening night reading, which this year features a particularly eclectic group of readers, from Salman Rushdie to Patti Smith—plus Mohsin Hamid, László Krasznahorkai, Andrea Levy, Yiyun Li, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, Sofi Oksanen, Atiq Rahimi, Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, Andrzej Stasiuk, and Miguel Syjuco.

In keeping with the last couple of World Voices Festivals, each of these readers will read in his or her own language, with the English text of the reading scrolling on a giant screen behind them. You can hear the poetry of the original—and still know what the readers are talking about (and appreciate the work of their translators, too).

This year, the “Opening Night Extravaganza” will be held in the beautiful reading space at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center.

Readings from Around the Globe: Opening Night Extravaganza

When: Wednesday, April 28 Where: 92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center, 1395 Lexington Avenue, New York City What time: 8–9:30 p.m. Tickets: $20/$15 PEN Members and Poetry Center subscribers; www.smarttix.com or (212) 868-4444. For Member discount code, please contact Lara Tobin at lara@pen.org or (212) 334-1660 ext. 126. Co-sponsored by 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center

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.

Nobel Peace Prize nominations

Yesterday, Anthony Appiah, the current president of PEN American Center, published a letter nominating Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace Prize, citing Liu’s “distinguished and principled leadership in the area of human and political rights and freedom of expression.”

Appiah’s letter was endorsed by a number of prominent PEN members, among them Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Jhumpa Lahiri, and several of the writers who rallied for Liu Xiaobo on New Year’s Eve, including Edward Albee, E.L. Doctorow, and A.M. Homes (pictured right is a sign from the rally; the photo was taken by Brian Montopoli).

Vaclav Havel, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama have also asked the Nobel committee to consider Liu for the Peace Prize.

Ma Zhaoxu, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, “said it would be a mistake to give Liu such an award,” according to Ben Blanchard and Huang Yan of Reuters:

“If the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to such a person, it is obvious that it is totally wrong,” Ma told a regular news briefing in Beijing, without elaborating.

No citizen of China has ever won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Meanwhile, according to the AP, the head of Norway’s Conservative Party, Erna Solberg, nominated Russian human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina and her group Memorial for the Prize. PEN worked with Memorial to honor Natalia Estemirova, who was affiliated with Memorial, in October. Estemirova herself spoke with David Remnick about slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya at a 2006 PEN World Voices event; you can listen to their conversation at PEN.org.

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

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.)

Sebastian Horsley, World Voices, and other news

As you may have heard, British memoirist Sebastian Horsley was denied entry into the US on account of "moral turpitude." As mentioned here before, PEN has long opposed ideological exclusion, and even if Horsley is no Doris Lessing, laws like this shouldn't be abided.

And so Horsley has been invited to this year's World Voices festival, April 28-May 4 in New York (with satellite events in Boston-- i.e., Cambridge-- and Rochester). With any luck, the US government will get the chance to exclude him once again, and draw further attention to this frankly un-American policy.

If they do so, though, he'll miss some great events: Ian McEwan and Steven Pinker; Rushdie, Eco, and Vargas Llosa together again; Rabih Alameddine talking with Aleksandar Hemon; Susan Bernofsky, Deborah Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eugenides, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Michael Krüger paying tribute to Robert Walser; the list goes on and on.

For some less partial-- but no less favorable-- responses to the lineup, see here, here, and here (that last link includes a great write-up by James Marcus of the "launch" event held last week aboard the Queen Mary 2; by the way, the unidentified kazoo player Marcus mentions, who joined Dale Peck and Jonathan Ames on stage, was the indefatigable Fran Manushkin).

Also, if you missed it, the winners of the PEN Translation Fund's 2008 grants have been announced. A bunch of great projects that shouldn't be without publishers for long.

Update: more write-ups of the Queen Mary 2 event here, here, and here.

Late update: PEN's letter to Condoleeza Rice and Michael Chertoff concerning Horsley. Also, the press release.

The Three Musketeers: Eco, Rushdie, and Vargas Llosa

In case you missed it before the holidays, PEN recently made the first event announcement for the 2008 World Voices Festival: Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, and Mario Vargas Llosa will converse at the 92nd Street Y on Friday, May 2, at 7:30 pm.

Here's the back-story:

On October 10, 1995, London’s Royal Festival Hall hosted a historic night of readings by three of the world’s most distinguished writers: Umberto Eco from Italy, British-Indian Salman Rushdie, and Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru. At dinner afterwards, Eco anointed the trio as The Three Musketeers.

Advance tickets are already on sale.

By the way, PEN American Center is now on Facebook, and so is the World Voices Festival. So go check us out there as well.

“Let the Olympic flame burn the prisons of thought down!”

Earlier today-- International Human Rights Day-- PEN President Francine Prose, along with Nelofer Pazira and Zheng Yi (the presidents of PEN Canada and Independent Chinese PEN, respectively) issued a letter to Hu Jintao, the President of the People’s Republic of China, and to Procurator General Mr. Jia Chunwang.

We are writing on behalf of our members and the entire community of International PEN, the worldwide association of writers, to urge you to release 40 of our colleagues who are in prison in your country in violation of their right to freedom of expression.

This past August, China launched a publicity campaign proclaiming “We Are Ready” to host the Olympic Games in August 2008. Today, on the 59th commemoration of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we challenge you to demonstrate that China is in fact ready – not just to stage the Olympics, but to acknowledge, protect, and celebrate the full rights of its citizens.

Read the rest here. They also included case work on those 40 writers, descriptions of which you can read here. More details about this campaign are here. You can also get help writing a letter to the Chinese government or to your US Representative.

Update: Salman Rushdie weighs in. “There are 40 of our colleagues in Chinese prisons who shouldn’t be in prison. It will be an embarrassment for China if even one of them is still in prison when the Games begin next August. There’s only one good number: zero.”

(The title of this post comes from Zheng Yi.)

“I haven't got your shoulders”

Norman Mailer was president of PEN American Center from 1984 to 1986. In that last year, he “used all his powers of persuasion and charm,” as Salman Rushdie recently recalled, “to raise the funds that brought more than 50 of the world’s leading writers to Manhattan to debate, with almost 100 of America’s finest, the exalted theme of ‘The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State.’” According to Rushdie—who was, he confesses, “more than a little awestruck”—the “atmosphere” at this grand PEN congress was “electric from the start.”

Much to the chagrin of PEN members, Mailer had invited Secretary of State George Schultz to speak at the opening ceremony, at the Public Library. This prompted howls of protest by the South African writers Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Sipho Sepamla, who accused Schultz of supporting apartheid. Other writers, including E. L. Doctorow, Grace Paley, Elizabeth Hardwick, John Irving and many more, also disapproved of Schultz's presence, protesting that writers were being set up “as a forum for the Reagan administration,” as Doctorow put it.

Rushdie goes on to quote Mailer’s welcoming remarks, in which he spoke of New York: “If it is one of the great cities of our civilization, it is, like that civilization, in peril from above, from below and on the flank.”

Links to interviews and remembrances of Mailer have abounded on literary blogs over the last few days, and here’s one more: Hilton Als recalling the unusual, combative friendship between Mailer and James Baldwin in PEN America 2. (The title of this post comes from a remark-- ironic? sly, surely-- by Baldwin, directed at Mailer, in his 1961 essay, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy.”) As Als notes, the written exchanges between Baldwin and Mailer were charged with questions not only about race but about sexuality.

There is something remarkable and even inspiring about the willingness of both men to so publicly engage with each other on these fraught, personal subjects. Among the many public relationships in Mailer's long and varied career, this one is certainly worth remembering.

(Photo of Mailer by Doug Elbinger, Elbinger Studios; photo of Baldwin by John "Hoppy" Hopkins.)

Monday Miscellany

Tonight at 7, at the Donnell Library in midtown Manhattan, PEN will celebrate the winners of this year's Beyond Margins awards: novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (for Half of a Yellow Sun), poet Harryette Mullen (for Recyclopedia), critic Ernest Hardy (for Bloodbeats Vol. 1), and poet Alberto Álvaro Ríos (for Theater of Night).

Jaime Manrique and Sonia Sanchez will host an evening saluting the winners of the 2007 Beyond Margins Award. Joining in the celebration will be writers Adam Haslett, Marie Ponsot, and Monique Truong.

The evening will feature readings and conversation with this year's winners, as well as a reception following the event.

It is free and open to the public.

John Freeman has been blogging from the Frankfurt Book Fair, and he gives a mention to Eurozine, the multi-lingual online magazine with some great pieces on literature in several different languages. (Don't miss the "set language" button to the above right of those pieces.) Freeman mentions a piece on the "next great Estonian novel"; looking it over quickly, I didn't see any mention of the Truth and Justice pentalogy. Too old? (See also: Conversational Reading.)

Lastly, courtesy of Janaka Stucky of Black Ocean, those who have either worked on or submitted something to-- or possibly even read-- a literary magazine may enjoy The Futility Review, "dedicated to the non-publication of the best works of the best poets in the English-speaking world," where "any poet, no matter whether accomplished or beginning, will be rejected in the same open-handed manner." Be sure to check out the submission guidelines:

Does your submission contain any of these words: shard, limn, or numinous?

Regrettably, Yes

Do your poems mention grandma or your first dog?

What's wrong with that?

Is there any mention of butterflies or unicorns in your work?

Just in that one place

PS. Italo Calvino was born on this day in 1923. (He died on September 19, 1985.) Read tributes to Calvino by Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie, from PEN America 1: Classics.