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Perumal Murugan, a Literary Suicide
"The trend in India of writers being harassed and stigmatized for their work is troubling. It is imperative that writers from both inside and outside India support these voices,… More
Releasing Roots: On Translating Vaan Nguyen
Truffles are notoriously difficult to domesticate, and I have taken this to heart as I translate Nguyen’s poems and their unexpected, unpredictable movements and juxtapositions. More
The Truffle Eye
Shadows rest on these benches / and you weep lion tears / and bite me with literary envy, / you bite down hard on my back More
Don’t Pity the Subject Being Smashed, Rage at the Object Doing the Smashing
"That is why The Bluest Eye is dangerous and always situated on a banned books list. It exposes the violence that besets the human condition as a result of… More
The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture at the PEN World Voices Festival
“So I imagine that the originators [of PEN] believed that what was required, if mankind was not to destroy itself, was an organized reminder that humanity’s survival transcended any… More
Cold War Dress Code: Remembering Inna Lisnyanskaya
Paradoxically, the Metropole affair both silenced Lisnyanskaya as a poet in the USSR and liberated her from the restrictions imposed by publishing (self-censorship being an obligatory tool in the… More
Free Expression Daily Digest: Thurs., October 1
Khadija Ismayilova still hopeful, a Turkish columnist is injured in an assault, and a Kenyan governor drives journalists from his county. More
Three Questions with Brian Blanchfield
I uncover here a responsibility I feel—to attempt disinhibition, to include affective knowledge, to be inside the body, to report from a place of personal discomfort or unease. Ursula… More
Ban, Restriction, Whatever!: On Ted Dawe’s Into the River
Long time children's and young adult librarian, judge for children's book awards, Trustee of the Storylines Children’s Literature Charitable Trust of New Zealand, and literary agent Frances Plumpton discusses… More
Gutted: How Kathy Acker’s “Blood and Guts in High School” Saved My Life
This book, this author, this girl body said: Make art. A girl is born and we make a story of her. Daughter. Lover. Wife. Mother. In Kathy Acker’s… More
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