Writers are people armed with words, and PEN is an organization, with centers around the world, which boasts of a 91 year history of using those words to give a voice to writers whose lives have been threatened or lost because of what they wanted to say or...

The behemoth has gone home, dragging its entrails - disguised as a purple velvet coat - behind it. Boston has waved goodbye to the AWP conference best described by Steve Almond, in his piece for The New Republic, as "the vast roving capital of American literary...

I began to write this as a comment to a post by a dear friend and activist on Facebook, but decided to use this space instead. The link was to an article on Huffington Post, "Why I Won't Support One Billion Rising," by Natalie Gyte from the Women's...

Donna Denner, an elementary school art teacher from Danbury, whose classroom was locked down after the shooting, is quoted as having asked if the rest of us in the country was responding as she was: "Are they going about their regular activities? Is it just another news story...

Upon announcing the 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships, Poetry editor Christian Wiman said, "The history of Poetry is filled with some of the best-known names in American poetry; my guess is that these young poets will be among those we'll be talking about in the years to come."...

Cheryl Strayed did not set out to discover herself with a $200,000 book advance and an inner compass set to taste, meditate and indulge. She turned her back on a world of experiences that had left her bereft and began to walk, in solitude, to learn how to survive alone....

The narrator in the final story in Natalie Serber's collection, Shout Her Lovely Name (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June, 2012) describes her contrary opinion regarding a book (set in Afghanistan, hint hint), selected by her suburban book club. She says she found "the novel's perfectly balanced shape...

Eight years after Ted Conover's book, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (Random House, 2000), came out, a Pew report found that 1 in 100 Americans were behind bars. Although the overall prison population has declined in each of the last three years under...

Temperatures warmed and the Occupiers went back to the streets in April, which also happened to be National Poetry Month. The month usually dawns with the usual list of celebrations by the usual list of suspects: events scheduled by the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American...

May 8th was a big day for Tayari Jones. That is when her third novel, Silver Sparrow (Algonquin, 2011), which deals with the two families created by a single man, came out in paperback. To kick-off the whirlwind of reading and speaking engagements, her publisher has...

We won't know the winner of this year's Man Asian Literary Prize, until Thursday evening, March 15th, when the name will be announced at a ceremony in Hong Kong, so here's the next best thing: an interview with one of the judges, Pulitzer Prize-nominated fiction writer,

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Annual Conference in any year is an unwieldy, slippery beast that grows tentacles and Gorgon heads before ones eyes. You arrive intending to do X, Y and Z and you end up discovering an alphabet in Chinese characters. You dress...

The standard MO for new writers is to generate a collection of short stories before walking off into the sunset to produce the follow-up novel. The shelf-life of these "career-starter" works is usually brief; the short-fiction, unless resuscitated by other writers in workshops, dies its natural death only to be...

As a rule, poets have neither agents nor big contracts. Their art is seldom put to the test that most writers of fiction endure: will it sell? Untethered by such considerations, it seems, they are free to be true to their particular aesthetic, focussing on writing good poetry rather than...

Mamilla cemetery, located just inside West Jerusalem, contains the remains of several prominent Islamic leaders, including those who fought alongside Saladin, who retook Jerusalem from the Crusaders. It is visited also by the descendants of the less illustrious, like Mohammed al-Dejani, whose great-grandfather is buried there. The Israeli...

We can all recite famous first lines. "Call me Ismael" (Melville, Moby-Dick), "A screaming comes across the sky." (Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow), "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins," (Nabokov, Lolita), "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,"...

Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert Blake recently told the Indian Express that the meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Chief Minister for Tamil Nadu, Jayalalitha, occurred "in the context of this recent film, the Channel 4 documentary that's...

As the parent of three avid readers, I agree with Meghan Cox Gurdon's point that what is considered "banning" in the book trade is known in the parenting world as doing our job. In a piece in the Wall Street Journal this week, she writes:

It is...

When the doors bang shut behind you, in that way that old, wooden doors do, and the odor of morning nourishments, the eggs, the blueberries, the toast, rush forward to greet you, the writer who has just come in, has but one thought, a thought only tangentially related to the...

On April secnd, Sri Lanka takes on India in the final for the ICC World Cup. What better day on which to think about Shehan Karunatilaka's debut novel, Chinaman, which has been described as being "ambitious, playful and strikingly original, [a novel] about cricket...