PEN America #9: Checkpoints

The new issue of PEN America arrived earlier this week and has a ton of interesting articles, interviews, fiction, and poetry.

The pieces by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed and Anya Ulinich look great, but the real highlight to me is the transcripts from some of the PEN World Voices events. There’s no way one can attend all the events he/she wants to during the festival, so it’s great that PEN makes the video/audio of many of the events available online and supplements that by printing some of the transcripts in this magazine.

For instance, this issue reprints the conversations with Peter Esterhazy and Wayne Koestenbaum, Jeffrey Eugenides and Daniel Kehlmann, and Albert Mobilio, Elias Khoury, and Nuruddin Farah.

Overall, it’s another great issue, and definitely worth the cover price.