The Great Global Book Swap

The launch event for PEN America 14: The Good Books is now online. Colum McCann kicked it off by reading Rabih Alameddine’s lovely contribution to the forum, in which Rabih imagines bringing The Book of Disquiet to a hotel in Lisbon.

After Colum’s reading, I spoke to Leila Aboulela, Nathacha Appanah, and Rahul Bhattacharya about the books each of them would bring to their own imaginary book swaps. Leila brought Tayeb Salih’s The Wedding of Zein (which she has read multiple times in both Arabic and English—sometimes wanting to read it in one language, sometimes preferring the other), Nathacha brought Beyond Despair, three lectures by Aharon Appelfeld (who, as Nathacha noted, was born in what is now the Ukraine with German as his first language but chose to write in Hebrew), and Rahul brought Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel García Márquez (Rahul’s reading of the book's conclusion was one of the highlights of the event).

You can watch the whole thing below:



You can also now order both the print edition and the Kindle edition of PEN America 14: The Good Books. Stay tuned for highlights from the issue, coming soon.

Friday event for PEN America 14: The Good Books

As I mentioned last week, the first copies of PEN America 14: The Good Books arrived in New York today. We'll have excerpts to read online after the festival is over, but if you're in New York, you'll find copies at select World Voices events -- including "The Great Global Book Swap," a reading and conversation we're holding on Friday in connection with the new issue.

For the Friday event, Leila Aboulela, Nathacha Appanah, Mario Bellatín, and Rahul Bhattacharya have chosen books they read in translation that meant a great deal to them as readers and writers. They will read short excerpts from their selections and discuss why they chose the books they did -- and we'll also discuss the larger subject of literature in translation around the world. Collectively, our Friday panelists have lived in France, India, Mexico, Mauritius, Qatar, Scotland, Sudan, and at least one or two other places as well.

This is a live version of our new issue's forum, in which over 50 writers (among them: Madison Smartt Bell, Amitava Kumar, Yiyun Li, Karen Russell, Lynne Tillman, and many more) imagine they've been invited to a great global book swap, and must bring one book in translation. There are many wonderful choices beautifully explained, and we'll be sharing a number of those pieces here and at PEN.org in the weeks to come.

In the meantime, I hope you can join us on Friday. Here are the full details:

When: Friday, April 29
Where: Scandinavia House, 58 Park Ave., New York City
What time: 2–3:30 p.m.

With Leila Aboulela, Nathacha Appanah, Mario Bellatín, and Rahul Bhattacharya
Free and open to the public. No reservations required.

Co-sponsored by Scandinavia House and PEN America

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Imagine you are invited to a great global book swap and have to bring just one beloved book originally written in a foreign tongue: what would it be? Join five eminent writers who have trotted the globe and lived everywhere from Mexico to Mauritius, India to Sudan, for a reading and a talk about the works of translation that enriched and changed their lives.

PEN World Voices next week!

Issue #14 of PEN America will arrive on Monday -- with copies going out to subscribers, PEN members, and bookstores shortly after -- along with news here about all the great stuff that's in it. In the meantime, a few highlights from the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, happening in New York City all next week.

These are ticketed events with limited seating, so if you're interested you should act soon. There are also many free events, next week; have a look at the whole schedule.

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Revolutionaries in the Arab World

Wednesday, April 27, 7:30 p.m.
92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center

Hear from experts and on-the-ground bloggers how social media and citizen journalism galvanize the revolution. In the borderless world of the Internet, where revolutionary ideas spread at lightning speed, will other despotic regimes collapse? Which ones? And how does an autocracy transition into a democracy, and at what cost? Alex Nunns, editor of Tweets from Tahrir -- a collection of key tweets from the activists who brought heady days of revolution to Egypt in early 2011 -- will be joined by Palestinian author/journalist Rula Jebreal (Miral), blogger Issandr El Amrani (The Arabist), Moroccan writer Abdellah Taia, and Moroccan-Dutch writer Adbelkader Benali to tackle these urgent questions.

Tickets: $20/$15 PEN Members, students with valid ID.

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China in Two Acts

Thursday, April 28, 7 p.m.
The Cooper Union, Great Hall

Born in Beijing and educated in the United States, New Yorker contributor Zha Jianying delivers unique insight into the rapidly changing world inside China, including the plights of the country's best-known artist Ai Wei Wei and Nobel peace Prize winner and political prisoner Liu Xiaobo. In a 30-minute presentation, Zha sheds light on the polarized political order and the cultural forces that are shaping the world’s most populous nation. Following Zha’s remarks, a panel of journalists and writers join her on stage for a lively debate of her assertions.

Tickets: $15/$10 PEN Members, students with valid ID.

Note: The Chinese governemnt has barred Liao Yiwu from attending the festival. Read more here.

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Poetry: The Second Skin
Friday, April 29, 7:30 pm
92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center

An evening of poetry and music curated and emceed by Laurie Anderson. With a stellar line-up of international poets, including John Burnside (Scotland), Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua), David-Dephy Gogibedashvili (Georgia), Hasina Gul (Pakistan), Yusef Komunyakaa (US), Juan Carlos Mestre (Spain), Joachim Sartorius (Germany), and Pia Tafdrup (Denmark).

Tickets: $25/$20 PEN and PSA Members, students with valid ID.

PEN Translation grants: applications due February 3

Applications for grants from the PEN Translation Fund are due in two weeks. 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.

February 3rd is also the deadline for most other PEN Awards. You can find out more information here.

Submissions for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Sports Writing, and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Award are due by March 3rd.

Next week: Stoppard, Doctorow, DeLillo & the Belarus Free Theater

Just a few weeks ago, the members of the Belarus Free Theater were either in jail or in hiding. Now they are performing their play Being Harold Pinter as part of the Under the Radar Festival in New York. Soon they will be back in Belarus, where they will continue to risk the wrath of President Aleksandr Lukashenko, the man known as “Europe’s last dictator.”

On the eve of their return to Minsk, the Belarus Free Theater joins internationally-acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard, PEN American Center, and a stellar supporting cast for an evening celebrating artistic freedom and the courage of hundreds of writers, artists, journalists, and intellectuals targeted in Lukashenko’s latest crackdown following the nation’s flawed December elections.

Czech musician Iva Bittova and American actor Billy Crudup will join Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Tom Stoppard, and surprise guests for a farewell gathering featuring literature, music, and cocktail conversation about the power of art and the future of Belarus.

Viva the Belarus Free Theater

When: Wednesday, January 19, 7 p.m.
Where: Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, New York City
Who: Billy Crudup, E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Tom Stoppard, Iva Bittova, the Belarus Free Theater, and surprise guests

Tickets: $25. Visit lepoissonrouge.com.

All proceeds to benefit the Belarus Free Theater.

(Photograph of the Belarus Free Theatre performing in London taken by Keith Pattison.)

Dispatch from Oslo: Larry Siems

I had the honor of attending the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo today as an official representative of PEN American Center. The ceremony, with its empty chair representing imprisoned writer and laureate Liu Xiaobo, was stunning and perfectly pitched in an especially Norwegian way—austere and straightforward, principled and direct. There were three particularly sustained, heartfelt ovations: when Nobel Committee Chair Thorbjørn Jagland said, early in his speech, that the response of the Chinese government to the award has in a sense validated the award; when he said Liu has done nothing wrong and must be released; and when he placed the Nobel medal and citation on Liu’s empty chair. I sat near many of our Independent Chinese PEN Center colleagues and other legendary dissidents and activists, and right next to the daughter of Wang Bingzhang, a prominent pro-democracy activist now in his eighth year of a life sentence in China; you can just imagine what the ceremony meant to her and to them.

Two other huge highlights, post-ceremony: I visited a preview of the exhibition on Liu Xiaobo at the Nobel Peace Center that will open tomorrow. I was overwhelmed when I walked into the room, glanced over to the first wall you see, and there were three video monitors playing, from left to right, Liu Xia speaking in Beijing in March 2010, PEN’s New Year’s Eve rally, and Liu Xiaobo talking about freedom of expression. Across the room, flanking an enormous, beautiful photo of Liu, were two banners, one with Jeffrey Yang’s translation of Liu’s poem “Daybreak” and one with Don DeLillo’s text for Liu. There it was, for the world, so much of all of PEN’s amazing work.

Also touring the exhibition preview was Nancy Pelosi; as she was leaving she gave an impromptu press conference, in which she spoke with incredible humanity and passion about what this day means for so many who have worked (as she has) for so long to bring attention to China’s human rights record. Generous, eloquent, clearly moved by the ceremony and the exhibition, she did us all proud.




Here’s to Liu Xiaobo. Here’s to freedom of expression in China.










Larry Siems is the Freedom to Write and International Programs Director at PEN American Center.

Photographs, from top to bottom: Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony, Larry Siems; Nobel Peace Prize Exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center, Larry Siems; Torchlight Procession outside Oslo's Grand Hotel, where the laureate typically greets well-wishers, Marian Botsford Fraser.

More poetry by Liu Xiaobo

Today, The New York Times ran an excerpt from “Experiencing Death,” a poem by Liu Xiaobo, translated by Jeffrey Yang.

From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash
I’ve drained the drink of the martyrs, sense spring’s
about to break into the brocade-brilliance of myriad flowers

Deep in the night, empty road
I’m biking home
I stop at a cigarette stand
A car follows me, crashes over my bicycle
some enormous brutes seize me
I’m handcuffed eyes covered mouth gagged
thrown into a prison van heading nowhere

Read the rest. The poem is from a collection of elegiac poems remembering the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, and Jeffrey will be translating the whole book for Graywolf Press, as reported today in the Star Tribune:

June Fourth Elegies is an intense collection, its translator, Jeffrey Yang, said Wednesday. It is divided into 20 sections, each relating to the June 4, 1989, massacre at Tiananmen Square.

“The way the book is structured, the poems were written kind of at the same time every year, when Tiananmen happened,” Yang said. “Each one is a kind of recollection of a certain aspect of June 4. They’re very elegiac. The original title of the book in Chinese is literally something like Remembering Six Four.”

You can learn more about Liu Xiaobo at www.PEN.org/liu. You can read more of his poetry here and here—at that second link you can also hear his poems read by Paul Auster, Edward Albee, Don DeLillo, and E.L. Doctorow. (That second group of poems was first published in PEN America 11: Make Believe.) An essay he wrote about the internet in China was published in the (London) Times. (Update: a collection Liu’s political writings will also be published in English next year, by Harvard University Press.)

You can also watch Liu Xiaobo himself discuss freedom of expression here, and here you can watch several PEN writers read both his poetry and the seven sentences cited by the court in China when sentencing him to eleven years in prison.

(Photo from December 31, 2009 rally at the New York Public Library by Brian Montopoli.)