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PEN Urges Obama to Press Russia on Expression; Russian Writers Speak Out
New laws in Russia barring religious offense and 'homosexual propaganda' are troubling signs of an increasingly restrictive environment for freedom of expression. More
PEN Letter to President Obama in Advance of the G20 Summit in St. Petersburg
PEN sent the following letter to President Obama in advance of the G20 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, to urge him to use the opporutnity to express concern over… More
On the Frontiers of Plaster (A Few Notes on Sleep)
Take a man at noon. He stands erect. Overhead is the sun. I won’t say this man has no wish to maintain this position for all time, but it’s… More
On Translating Jean Ferry
"I thought: here is an author who unites disparate readerships, surely of use in our niche-fractured literary landscape, where readers divided by camp and interest can be reunited by… More
On Translating Vasily Kamensky
Approaching words as assemblages of letters, Kamensky employs the Futurist device of sdvig, or distortion, to inject modularity, pliability, and indeterminacy into the lexical field: by combining words, or… More
Tango with Cows
Tango with Cows is a key artifact in the history of Russian Futurism, modernist typography, visual poetry, and artist’s books. Printed in Moscow in 1914 on brightly-colored pentagonal wallpaper,… More
PEN / Guernica at Lit Crawl NYC – 9/14
In support of the PEN/Guernica Flash Series, the PEN Poetry Series, and Guernica's poetry series, we're teaming up poets, novelists, flash writers, staffers, and editors from both organizations for… More
Six Poems by Lily Mazzarella
All summer, the road was littered / with songbirds, their heads smashed in / I was poisoned by absinthe, and set a field / on fire, and spent the… More
France, story of a childhood
I am a girl. I have two obedient sisters, six brothers, and a father who blames me for being born. More
On Translating Zahia Rahmani
When I first discovered Rahmani’s work in 2009, I was ignorant of the Harki identity—I had never even heard the term. Gripped by the author’s sense of urgency… More