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Writers Demand Release of Jailed Colleagues Before Beijing Olympics
World-renowned writers from China and North America marked International Human Rights Day today by launching 40:242 – We Are Ready for Freedom of Expression, a campaign that challenges the… More
Sidney Offit: Memories of Norman Mailer
My memories of Norman Mailer drift back more than forty years to an evening we shared at one of the PEN cocktail parties. Held at the Pierre Hotel, these… More
Interview with Patricia Prewitt
QUESTION: What was the spark that made you begin writing in prison? When did it occur? PATRICIA PREWITT: When I was sent to prison in April of 1986, my five… More
Tribute to Norman Mailer
There was the true Norman and the public Norman. I really only knew the true Norman—thank God—because there was a huge difference between the two. More
Tribute to Norman Mailer
Unlike other literary figures, Mailer was not prone to elite sensibilities in his private or public life. He was not a pragmatist nor an opportunist, nor was he politically… More
Tribute to Norman Mailer
I scarcely knew him as a man, but I knew the work made by the man. Reading him when I was twelve—memorizing the obscene lyrics in The Naked and… More
Remembering Norman Mailer
I first met Norman Mailer in the spring of l948, when the United States, the ocean liner my mother and I were traveling on—it may have been its maiden… More
History of My Face
My lips came with a caravan of slavesThat belonged to the Grand Sanussi.In Al-Jaghbub he freed them.They still live in the poor section of BenghaziNear the hospital where I… More
The Last Iraq
The Last IraqEach night I sit Iraq on my tableand pinch his earsuntil his eyes fill up with tearsof joy.Another cold winter, crisscrossed by jet fighters.Soldiers sit on a… More
Literature & Power: Writing about Politics, with John Ralston Saul, Oksana Zabuzhko, Shashi Tharoor, Tomás Eloy Martinez, Francine Prose, and Bernard-Henri Levy
My greatest shock came not from critics proclaiming me a witch who deserved to be burned were it not for our civilized times, but from crowds of enthusiastic female… More
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