PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature Dispatch 1. Michael Cunningham didn’t take the stage right away at the Museum...
On its surface, the story of Coral Glynn appears simple: the titular nurse Coral arrives at Hart House to care for an elderly woman dying of cancer, and her son, Major Clement Hart, takes a shine to her. In less deft hands, this material would be ripe for all sorts of weeping and rending of garments, but Cameron works with a deft hand, never succumbing to histrionics. Read More
Techno, as any DJ will tell you, is a circular form of music. Its structure is built from repeating patterns called loops which the enterprising DJ can stitch into a long, continuous track. In this way, Brane Mozetič’s Lost Story resembles a techno track. Written in the form of a diary, Lost Story follows a young gay Slovenian, Bojan, who’s stuck in a loop of drugs, clubs, sex. Read More
A fun fact about lightning: a strike lasts for about 30 microseconds.
Lightning People starts with a similar flash. The narrator of the prologue, Joseph Guiteau, speaks in conspiratorial terms, suggesting a link between a rise in lightning-related Manhattan-area deaths and the fall of the Twin Towers. Read More
Hensher, who was shortlisted for 2008’s Man Booker Prize for The Northern Clemency, is less interested in the paranoiac and more in the panoptic. As the novel begins, Hensher introduces a dizzying array of characters from the English town of Hanmouth.
Hensher hops from one viewpoint to another, and this kaleidoscopic approach, though initially confusing, pays off... Read More
It should come as no surprise that Colm Tóibín admires Henry James; Tóibín, after all, wrote a novelization of James’...
PEN World Voices Festival Dispatch True or false? Abdellah Taïa is the first openly gay author from Morocco. Taïa adores...
PEN American Center kicked off its seventh season On the first day of the PEN World Voices Festival of International...
Interesting fact: when it was first published in hardcover, Terry Castle’s The Professor: A Sentimental Education was called The Professor...
Lambda Award Finalist Full disclosure: I am ‘friends’ with James Morrison on Facebook (though we’ve never met in person), and...
