PEN World Voices: Recap
The fifth annual PEN World Voices Festival ended on Sunday, and based on the attendance at the few events I went to, it was pretty successful. I wasn’t able to attend as many panels as I would’ve liked, which is sort of a plus and minus for the festival—there’s a lot to choose from and you really do ...
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What Makes a Good Panel?
This was the question that Leon Neyfakh from the New York Observer asked a few people at the recent PEN Foundation annual gala. The answers aren’t all that provocative or surprising: Edmund White points out how most panels are “an exercise of competing egos rather than an effort to communicate or focus on the ...
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Hermano Cerdo: Issue 23
As mentioned on Conversational Reading, the new issue of Hermano Cerdo is now available. Included in this issue are articles on Juan Jose Millas’s El Mundo, on Sergio Chejfec’s Los incompletos y Mis dos mundos, and on Daniel Sada’s Casi nunca, which will be published by Graywolf. ...
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Black Beach and Other Plays: Catalan Drama
With Catalan Days quickly approaching (the festival kicks off on Saturday with the Merce Rodoreda/Jessica Lange event at the Baryshnikov Arts Center) this seems like an appropriate time to mention Black Beach and Other Plays a collection of three works of contemporary Catalan drama by Jordi Coca, Joan Casas, and Lluisa ...
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English vs. The World
There is so much wrong with Philip Jones’s “English writers outperform rivals” post on The Bookseller.com, that I’m not even sure where to start . . . I’ll get to the actual content of the article in a minute, but first off, what is up with this title? Since when did English writers have ...
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Every Man Dies Alone
Hans Fallada, née Rudolph Ditzen, led a tumultuous, short life, producing several great works even under the crushing hand of the Nazi Regime. Fallada’s own life, itself worthy of several novels, was plagued by drugs, alcohol, stints in sanatoriums, and most importantly, artistic integrity as a writer. At eighteen, he ...
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Latest Review: Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, translated from the German by Michael Hoffmann and published by Melville House earlier this year, has been receiving a ton of good attention, such as this review in the New Yorker and this bit for the daily Very Short List e-mail. Never before published in English, this novel is a ...
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