Literature & Power: Writing about Politics, with John Ralston Saul, Oksana Zabuzhko, Shashi Tharoor, Tomás Eloy Martinez, Francine Prose, and Bernard-Henri Levy
Does the history of the last century offer much support for the view that the literary imagination has any special purchase on political wisdom? Can literature mitigate the pressures… 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
The First Novel
The First NovelBe my heroine, whispers the Novel to the Novelist.Love me and die for me! orders the Novel to the Novelist.Poetry, please lend me your blade, cries the… More
Literature & Power: Writing about Politics, with John Ralston Saul, Oksana Zabuzhko, Shashi Tharoor, Tomás Eloy Martinez, Francine Prose, and Bernard-Henri Levy
As an Indian novelist, I find that literature’s relationship to power is particularly complex in countries like mine. Most developing countries are also formerly colonized countries, and one of… More
Literature & Power: Writing about Politics, with John Ralston Saul, Oksana Zabuzhko, Shashi Tharoor, Tomás Eloy Martinez, Francine Prose, and Bernard-Henri Levy
Literature is particularly unstable. It is that which is unstable, uncertain, which we don’t know how to label. Literary criticism can classify certain texts, but what the work of… More
Going Out for a Walk
It is a fact that not once in all my life have I gone out for a walk. I have been taken out for walks; but that is another… More
Larry Siems: Ken Saro-Wiwa: The High Price of Dissent
Larry Siems is a poet and director of the Freedom to Write and International Programs at PEN American Center.In the spring of 1995, Ken Wiwa stood in for his… More
On the Avenue
I didn’t know him, but he knew me. He knew Harlem, he knew poetry, he knew Jesus, and he knew my mother. He knew sin. I did not know… More
Freedom Fighter
As an international organization dedicated to the advancement of literature, PEN works to spread literacy in all communities, and to defend freedom of expression. For that reason it is… More
International Noir
The first thing I ever knew about Simenon was that he’d written an entire novel while enclosed in a glass booth in full view of the public. I heard… More
Support for the freedom to read with exclusive designs by Todd Parr, Mike Curato, Art Spiegelman, and more!
