This was the panel that I was on, which makes it sort of difficult to write about. <\/p>\n
I do want to say that Michael Moore—the Chair of the PEN<\/span> Translation Committee—did a fantastic job organizing and moderating this panel. He provided a lot of information about the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the recent attempt to block the publication of books from Cuba, Iran, and North Korea, and the PEN-instigated lawsuit to challenge this. <\/p>\n He also talked about the Tariq Ramadan situation. Ramadan was denied a visa to teach at Notre Dame, and as a result PEN<\/span> and the ACLU<\/span> have filed a lawsuit, arguing that Helene Atwan from Beacon Press was great on the panel, telling many interesting, occasionally depressing, stories. She talked about publishing a nonfiction book by a foreign journalist that sold nowhere near as well as a book by an American journalist, and she also told of an over-ambitious copyeditor who transformed a wonderfully odd piece of fiction into a book that read like it was written by a dull American writer. <\/p>\n Jill Schoolman was wonderful as well, talking about her experiences publishing Gate of the Sun<\/i> by Elias Khoury, and her surprise that American reviewers weren’t as critical and dismissive as certain UK reviewers. <\/p>\n Personally, I didn’t have a lot to add, although I was able to tell my story about receiving an e-mail from the Department of Homeland Security requesting a copy of Dubravka Ugresic’s Thank You for Not Reading<\/i> . . . <\/p>\n
\nAmerican citizens have a First Amendment right to hear his ideas.<\/p>\n