Blog
Filter By:
Advocacy • Analysis • Blog • Commentary • Drama • Essay • Event • Feature • Fiction • Graphic Narrative • Interview • Memoir • News • Obituary • Open Letter • Poetry • Press Release • Profile
Browse By Series:
PEN Poetry Series • Prison Writing • The PEN Ten Interviews • Illustrated PEN • Pen Pals • The PEN World
Browse By Email Subscription:
PEN America News • Educational Censorship News • Works of Justice
Something Radical
In the 1970s I traveled to Cuba for an international writers’ conference. After I had read a paper to an appreciative audience, some of the organizers asked me if… More
Performance Art
Here’s a theory—or elements of a theory—of the comic. In this theory, the comic contains or embraces six elements. The first is the quality of deadpan, of impassivity; for… More
Life and Deaths
ALAN ADELSON: In Regions of the Great Heresy, Jerzy Ficowski gives us this eloquent description of Bruno Schulz’s last days:The foreboding that had haunted Schulz his entire life was… More
Omniscient Omnivore
Gertrude Stein was well aware of all of this. She was a scientist of language and of thought and music—harmony and melody—in an uncanny way. Words like omniscient and… More
PEN Alarmed by Murder of Armenian-Turkish Journalist
PEN, the international association of writers, is appalled by the news of the murder today of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, who was shot dead outside his office in Istanbul. More
Dark Realities: What Can’t Be Said in Children’s Books
The PEN Children's Book Committee is a group of professionals who volunteer their time to advance children's literature and protect freedom of expression: the right of children's authors to… More
Being in Her
That’s what’s so wonderful when you immerse yourself in the tide of this novel. It’s somewhat like listening to a piece of music by Philip Glass or John Adams… More
The Consolations of Art
No matter how strange Proust’s life might have been, it has been subsumed, as he hoped, into the radiant vision of it that he presented in his writing. Nevertheless,… More
Bad Behavior
Prose fiction was born Protestant. It is a child of the Enlightenment, and though it has some exotic forebears—romance most nearly, drama and poetry further back—it could only have… More
The Invisible Parade
The pleasure that I get from Flannery O’Connor is so intimate that it’s difficult to share. I’ve been trying to think of how to get at her, and it… More
Support for the freedom to read with exclusive designs by Todd Parr, Mike Curato, Art Spiegelman, and more!
