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 Boy Who Played with Fusion: Extreme Science, Extreme Parenting, and How to Make a Star
"Instead of instinctively doing what most parents would regard as common sense—keeping their child away from things that could kill him—Tiffany and Kenneth shifted to what was essentially a… More
The End of Plenty: The Race to Feed a Crowded World
"If everyone in the world ate as much meat as Americans do (176 pounds per person per year), we’d need to find another planet to raise the feed and… More
The Disappearance Approach
He was lying in his bed with his eyes closed. I knew when I saw him with the CPAP mask over his mouth and nose and heard the whooshing… More
Irreparable Harm
The election of Bush was never the real problem. The assertion of power—in a matter in which the Court is morally and constitutionally precluded from playing any part—is. More
Los Angeles Plays Itself
"As much as any city, Los Angeles is a work-in-progress, a landscape of fragments where the boundaries we take for granted in other environments are not always clear." More
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Between the World and Me. Read an excerpt of the book. More
The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa
All day / I hear the fallen, trampled leaves groaning. / Such is the afternoon of life / It reports the time that has already passed. More
Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art
The pencil that was always in her hand when she began a painting, calculating its rhythms and transcribing her vision, may also be said to have transcribed her thought;… More
The Buffalo
Though no one was paying attention, she smoothed her skirt again, did what she could so no one would notice how weak and disgraced she was, haughtily protecting her… More
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