Featured Honorees
PEN America Literary Awards honorees have produced some of the most exceptional literary works of the past 50 years. Read interviews with or excerpts of work by featured authors and translators below.
The Septembers of Shiraz
CHAPTER 27Isaac stretches his legs, tapping them with his fingers to help his blood circulate. He is glad to have a sink in his room; he rinses his face… More
Ulf Stolterfoht: Lingos I-IX
(8) beautiful like: latent snap decayward —because abstract. horrible like the deathscreams of hedgehogs as they fade intothe night. that’s what the new poetryis like. there was a time when… More
The Clean House
CHARACTERSLane: A doctor, a woman in her early fifties. She wears white.Matilde: Lane’s cleaning lady, a woman in her late twenties. She wears black. She is Brazilian. She has… More
How She Penetrates
According to family lore, there was a great bonfire in which all of Jane’s possessions perished. Her journals, her clothes, her scrapbooks, her books, her typewriter, her school papers,… More
Rereading Saul Bellow
[2000] The Adventures of Augie March (1953) The transformation of the novelist who published Dangling Man in 1944 and The Victim in 1947 into the novelist who published The Adventures… More
Season of Ice
1In the beginning there was snow. Torrents of tiny flakes blew in off the lake, pricked my skin before they melted on my hands and face and tongue. I… More
Cut off the Ears of Winter
Cut Off the Ears of WinterCut off the ears of winterthey have overheard too much,where incinerators burn,where rubble-strewn streetsare covered in dust from the remodeling.Again, the doe-man in mauve… More
From Real Karaoke People
Summer evenings around a picnic table metropolis’d with food and condiments, the man’s fingers sweep the moon from his wife’s black mane, humming of lovers in an oarless boat on the East Sea… More
Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora
The scrawny street vendor in Hanoi studies my eyes, my lips. “Brother,” he says, “yours is not a Vietnamese face. It’s a face that has not known suffering.” Then… More
Support for the freedom to read with exclusive designs by Todd Parr, Mike Curato, Art Spiegelman, and more!
