The Way We Love Now: Antoine Audouard
“The way we love now.” I mean, who is “we”? Emily Dickinson: “That love is all there is, is all we know of love.” Okay? That pretty well does… More
The Way We Love Now: Meir Shalev
When we talk about love, it’s part of an international conspiracy: Writers know something about love that readers do not. The same way rabbis and priests and imams know… More
Confronting the Worst: Writing & Catastrophe
I’m not an expert on natural disaster, but on man-made disaster, namely wars. I assume that all of us have received the same question over and over again: “Why… More
Editor’s Note
The first annual PEN World Voices Festival brought together 125 writers from around the globe for a week of intense conversation about language, culture, crime, catastrophe, death, sex, religion—the… 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
The Power of the PEN: Antonio Munoz Molina
ListenRight in front of me, on a crowded subway train, a woman is reading Marcel Proust. I have never seen her before, and most likely I will never see… More
Writing Myth Now
The very first storyteller was, I think, a journalist. He was the man who reported on what was happening “out there.” Through the ages it was he who journeyed… More
The Power of the Pen: Salman Rushdie
A butterfly flaps its wings in India and we feel the breeze on our cheeks in New York. A throat is cleared somewhere in Africa and in California there’s… More
PEN Remembers Literary Scholar, Biographer, and PEN Member Virginia Spencer Carr
Carr was born on July 21, 1929 in West Palm Beach, FL and graduated from Florida State University. She earned her master’s degree in English from the University of… More
On Faith & Reason
Nothing that happens in my country matters In the large scheme of things But when I am there Breathing the dusty air of the dry months A cruel April to defy Eliot I know… More
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