Category: Events
PEN World Voices Festival: Master Class with Eduardo Galeano
"I learned the art of writing and the art of storytelling in the cafés of Montevideo," said the great and loved Eduardo Galeano during his hour-long conversation with Jessica Hagedorn Saturday night. It was as though all 500 of us at the filled-to-capacity auditorium at the New School were transported…...read more »
Category: Classics in Translation
Resonances: Contemporary Writers on the Classics at PEN World Voices Festival
My goal each day of the PEN World Voices Festival is to find one writer or one book I've never heard of that sparks my interest. What more could one ask for? Thursday's find was Marcel Möring whose novel, In a Dark Wood, owes its conception to Dante's Inferno. I found Möring at…...read more »
Category: Events
I Come From There: New Plays from the Arab World at PEN World Voices Festival
At the Martin E. Segal Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center yesterday afternoon, readings of two works by young playwrights—presented by the British Council and London’s Royal Court Theatre, with support from the Sundance Institute Theater Program—explored notions of home. In Withdrawal…...read more »
Category: Events
The Ears of the Hippopotamus
Astrid Lindgren is perhaps best known for Pippi Longstocking, her children’s classic, but she created many other fine characters, too, including “The Brothers Lionheart.” One of the feature characters in that adventure is a dragon named Katla, whom Lindgren named after a certain Icelandic…...read more »
Category: Events
AWP Report: Trends in South Asian Diaspora Writing
I was at the AWP conference in Denver this past weekend to give a reading and sign some chapbooks. The mood was cheery, the elevation high, the Colorado Rocky mountains (which I had never seen in person before) were glorious and the background chatter pleasant. I thought what would be a better panel…...read more »
Category: Events
News from the Paris Book Fair
The Paris Book Fair (March 26-31, 2010) celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year. The organizers invited 90 writers for the occasion, (60 of them from France and 30 from all over the world) to discuss the topic "Telling the World." Among the discussions were "Writers Exploring an Unknown Land"…...read more »
Category: Events
Some of the Things We’re Excited About For the Upcoming PEN World Voices Festival #PWVFEST
We are as always excited about the upcoming PEN World Voices Festival, to be held this year from Monday, April 26th, to Sunday May 2nd. Notably this year the festival will travel to six other cities around the United States. Sure to be an important discussion, the festival will begin with Lorraine Adams,…...read more »
Category: Events
Marías in America
It is significant, we learned from Javier Marías's U.S. publisher Barbara Epler recently at the New York Public Library, that he was in America. Marías refused to come to the United States for the eight years Goerge Bush was in office, much, I'm sure, to his publisher's chagrin…...read more »
Category: Events
European Lit Fest
Last month, a crumbling castle in the depths of the Styrian countryside became the unlikely meeting place for a motley group of writers, musicians and academics at an event organised by the European literature portal Readme.cc. The celebrated British poet Lavinia Greenlaw joined fellow writers from Germany,…...read more »
Category: Events
A Great Conversation on 2666
I think I could have listened to Francisco Goldman tell stories all night long, despite the heat raditating from over a hundred of us standing, eager Bolaño fans at Idlewild Bookstore Thursday night. While Goldman and Bolaño had never met - indeed, Goldman had not read Bolaño until…...read more »