The PEN Ten with Amitava Kumar
I fear it is fashionable for many writers to think that they have to be right. I want to be wrong but true. Our task is to be human. More
The PEN Ten with Peter von Ziegesar
Writing about my family in a memoir was about as daring as it gets ... I was sure that when the book came out I was going to be… More
The PEN Ten with Harvey J. Kaye
My lifelong hero—ever since I was a boy—is Thomas Paine, the American Revolutionary and radical-democratic pamphleteer. I would love to be identified with his words, words such as “The… More
The PEN Ten with Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Fidel Castro as the measure of all things. Why is it that no Latin American writer, after almost a century of tradition with the so-called “novels of the dictator,”… More
The PEN Ten with Amanda Vaill
I'm still surprised to answer "I'm a writer" when people ask me what I do. I wrote as a child—pages of what we would probably call fan-fiction today, extensions… More
The PEN Ten with Michael F. Moore
As an interpreter I’m a bit of a stage mother, pushing the writer or director for whom I’m interpreting to jump into the conversation (Forza! Dai! Sfondi! I whisper).… More
The PEN Ten with Kyle Minor
I wish American writers in general were less anti-intellectual, more interested in the interior life and exterior systems of power. I don't come from a subculture that had much… More
The PEN Ten with Lawrence Venuti
The translator ... bears an enormous responsibility, not just in relation to the source text, but in representing a foreign culture. Translations can create or strengthen stereotypes of foreign… More
The PEN Ten with Roxana Robinson
What the writer does is bear witness: we tell the stories of the things that disturb us most, and we try to tell them in the way that will… More
The PEN Ten with Je Banach
Writing may be courageous, but reading and speaking about what we read are also courageous acts. The discourse we create when we talk about books is daring just as… More
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