Literature

This year, October 30 marks the centennial birth anniversary of the Spanish poet Miguel Hernández, who died in prison in 1942. Unlike Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejos, Juan Ramon Jimenez, and other writers associated with the Spanish Civil War, Hernández remains relatively obscure outside Spain, where he continues to be loved and remembered.

An interesting point pertaining to prose fiction style caught my attention in the second part of the interview “One Story, Many Voices” (read Part 1 here). Mantle editor Shaun Randol points out that In My Dreams, It Was Simpler doesn’t have a lot of description, eliciting varied reactions and defenses from the novel’s many authors.

Interview with Writers for In My Dreams, It Was Simpler

(Part 2 of 2) (read Part 1 here)

Interview with writers for In My Dreams, It Was Simpler

(Part 1 of 2) (Part 2 of 2 here)

The yawning Great Hall of Cooper Union. Saturday, May 1st, 2010. The Hall is surprisingly empty for the three big names about the grace the stage. Banter and name-dropping occurs in the front row, the publishers of van Niekerk come up to me and we trade some information about The Mantle. The curtains are swept to the left and out steps K. Anthony Appiah, dressed from head to toe in black: a black necktie, vest, a black silk stripe down the sides of each leg and black loafers. He looks absolutely refined, head held high, papers clutched to his chest with long slender fingers tightly wound.

  To start things off, a segment from the beginning of The Secret Gardens of Mogador: Voices of the Earth by Alberto Ruy-Sánchez:

First Spiral: The Sleepwalker's Quest for a Voice

1. Dawn breaks, slowly . . . and it was as if the light were singing

It was in Mogador the hour when lovers rouse, their dreams still entangled between their legs, behind their eyes, in their mouths, filling their empty hands.

War. What is it good for? Writing. PEN World Voices Festival lined up two war-themed panels on the afternoon of April 30, one featuring a bevy of novelists, the other filled with a squad of journalists. Politics remained resolutely to the side of the two discussions. No talk about whether the Iraq invasion was a good or bad idea, no discussion as to whether or not overthrowing oppressive regimes with violence is necessary. Panelists across sessions have been witness to conflict, and they have used it for inspiration in writing. But why? And how?

In an age of digital domination, where the future of the book is uncertain, a panel entitled "Blogs, Twitter, the Kindle: The Future of Reading" and PEN World Voices Festival confronted the impact of new technology on our current understanding of, as well as engagement with, both writer and their writing. For a panel of writers, such technology has the potential to intimidate. Yet, the panel of five was surprisingly mixed.