Where the Wild Things Aren’t: On the Banning of Sendak
With his work Sendak acknowledges darkness and fear, and provides an introduction to complicated thinking, the basis for reason and, fundamentally, humanism. The very things that protective censors wish… More
On Translating Matieu Caragiale
One of the central texts of Romanian literature, its singular, impossibly ornate Romanian weds so well to its decadent subject that asking the work to embrace English seems a… More
Wish You Were Here: The Perks of Being Banned
The humanities are in crisis, they say, and I am telling you this because the banning of books is another kind of restricted access: If you reduce the amount… More
On Banning Barbara Comyns’s Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
I believe that one of the surest ways to enrage those inclined to censorship is to present a fictional world that requires the reader to provide the fictional world's… More
On Translating Athena Farrokhzad
[W]e are presented with a rigorously poetic exploration of migration, trauma, and intimacy, and although it may be seen as a document of a particular (immigrant) experience, Vitsvit is… More
Sharing Your Truth
Novelist and former PEN staffer Nick Burd kicks off our second annual Banned Books Month with some insight into the banning of his novel, The Vast Fields of Ordinary.… More
2013 Banned Books Month
Staring on Monday, September 23, PEN will begin posting essays from this year’s Banned Books Month, featuring PEN members, supporters, and staff—writers and editors of all backgrounds and genres—who… More
from Nine Buildings
Yao Nan said, every year we come to grave-sweeping time, and only then does it feel like spring. He could never understand why we’d wait for springtime, when flowers… More
On Translating Zou Jingzhi
‘Nine Buildings’ works through what he [Zou] witnessed and suffered as a child and young man, all the while retaining his customary spare, elegant prose and detached vision. More
On Translating Wang Xiaoni
The Chinese social and interpersonal landscape has been changing at breakneck speed for the last thirty years, and as witness to these seismic shifts, Wang Xiaoni consistently adopts an… More
Support for the freedom to read with exclusive designs by Todd Parr, Mike Curato, Art Spiegelman, and more!
