Conversation: Nahid Mozaffari and Sara Khalili
Nahid Mozaffari and Sara Khalili discuss Iranian literature and the problem of translation as part of a series of podcast interviews that took place at the 2009 Brooklyn Book… More
Conversation: Salman Rushdie & Hanan al-Shaykh
Salman Rushdie and Hanan al-Shaykh discuss Lebanon and how it has informed al-Shaykh?s writing in a conversation that took place during the 2005 PEN World Voices Festival. More
The Messiness of Now: A Conversation
Amitava Kumar: There was a man in the nineteenth century who anticipated everything that Ilija was going to do and write, and lived his life accordingly: Richard Francis Burton.… More
Etgar Keret & George Saunders
I was amazed by your stories, by the quality and quantity of imagination, and the unbelievable overflow of ideas. So I wanted to ask a question that’s probably unfair.… More
Inventing the Past: A Conversation
Suddenly, one day, I felt a certain pleasure, and this pleasure was greater than the sorrow of the therapeutic writing that I was doing. Suddenly I recovered my sense… More
Africa and the World
I’ve been asked very loosely to think about the relationship of African writers and Africa at large to American writing. An enormous topic, of course, but I’ll offer a… More
The Way We Love Now
As I was thinking about this, I began, as one obviously would, to think about the Pope. I have the TV on in my writing room and there was… More
International Noir: Breaking Out of Crime Time
If you think this is complexity—no, this is Mexican realism. This is a game; this is Walt Disney for Mexicans. Mexican reality is more horrible—they take our kidneys every… More
Francois Bizot: Confronting the Worst: Writing and Catastrophe
In 1971, I was caught by a revolutionary communist in Cambodia. I was chained and condemned to death and before that, interrogated by a young man who asked me… More
The Most Insidious Censorship: A Conversation
K. ANTHONY APPIAH: As member’s of PEN’s Freedom-to-Write Committee, we’re heirs to a tradition of worrying mostly about the role of governments in restricting access to information, which is… More
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