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Conversation With Noah
– If all those people must be flooded, is it not fair that they be warned?– The calamity itself is the warning.– Then your god is acting rashly.– What… More
A Field Guide to Ukrainian Sex
A Field Guide to Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko is a book that absolutely deserves to be translated into English, and pronto. Ostensibly the tale of a disastrous love… More
Watching As the World Vanishes
It was shameful, everyone agreed afterward, that no one did anything at the time. Because people knew it was happening. There were reports, early on. People saw things, near… More
Patriot Act reauthorization blocked
Writers, booksellers, librarians, and other defenders of reader privacy last night won the biggest battle yet in their four-year fight to restore the protections for the privacy of bookstore… More
Poet’s Choice
I attended an event last month in New York City sponsored by the PEN American Center and entitled "State of Emergency: Unconventional Readings." PEN believes that it is urgently… More
PEN denounces postponement in Orhan Pamuk trial
PEN, the world association of writers, decried the suspension of trial proceedings against Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, insisting the charges against him should have been dismissed outright and calling… More
1,001 Laughs
Back in the thirties, Borges worked for an Argentinean women's magazine called El Hogar--a magazine of middle-class attitudes and presumptions, roughly similar to Redbook in America today. More
A Place in the Procession
Long long ago I dreamed this: an old soul, mud-colored, thin, ropy-haired, hunkers at a campfire. A line of naked youth has formed on the lip of a cliff.… More
Salman Rushdie: The Imaginary Real
In 1981, Italo Calvino's book If on a Winter's Night a Traveler was published in England to what I remember as a more or less resounding silence. Very few… More
Michael Cunningham: First Love
"First Love," by Michael Cunningham, appears in PEN America 1: Classics. This talk was originally presented at a tribute to Virginia Woolf, sponsored by the PEN Forums Committee, at Town… More