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In Remembrance of Anthony Fleischer, Tireless Champion of South African Literature
The President of South African PEN died last week. PEN American Center President Peter Godwin and South African writer Margie Orford share their warm memories. More
The Future of Writing in English
In 2013, a Canadian company released the program ToneCheck that screens emails for potentially conflict causing language. Post-meeting anger: alert. Late night reach/bite toward a lost lover: don’t. More
Rita Duffy: Watchtower 2
From here it looks as if the whole country is spread under a camouflage tarp / rolled out by successive British garrisons / stationed in Crossmaglen. As teenagers we… More
Can you read my mind
Pride is truth's stiffest rival after shame and blood and everything else besides subtlety and re-written creation myths. Like that time I won my own heart in a dance,… More
How the Database is Powering the New World Economy
The other night I had a dream. The dream was a mountain./ with all the dimensions available to a mountain, including a full mineral inventory,/ cubic allotment of resources,… More
PEN Translation Committee Takes the Stage at BookExpo America
This year, for the first time, BookExpo America (BEA), held each May at the Javits Center in Manhattan, featured translation as the focus of its Global Market Forum.As a… More
Recommended Reading: Literary Sports Writing
These works of literary sports writing discuss much more than games. Award judges Joel Drucker, Chad Harbach, and Jackie MacMullan have chosen the following nine titles for the PEN/ESPN… More
(Poem from a Prison Cell)
If you ask after my finest day / on an occasion when words of pride are called for / I’d call history to mind, and say: / It was… More
Snowden One Year On: Four Things We Know
On the first anniversary, PEN looks at what we've learned over the course of one year of ongoing revelations, the state of surveillance reform moving through Congress, and what… More
On Surveillance: A Conversation with the American Reader
The NSA data net kind of has the same relation to the public as an individual person has to a celebrity. The NSA has this false appreciation of the… More