PEN American Center is pleased to announce the return of our popular Literary Pub Quiz! This Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend event gives you the chance to compete with (and against!) editors and writers from your favorite literary magazines, including Cabinet, Gigantic, Harper’s, and Electric Literature, as well as writers Matthea Harvey, Ben Greenman, and many more. Come early to reserve your spot on the team with the writer-captain who also knows where Hemingway was born. We’ll supply the paper and the pencils; you bring the literary smarts!

Team captains include Gabe Boylan of Harper’s, George Prochnik of Cabinet Magazine, James Yeh of Gigantic Magazine, Scott Lindenbaum and Andy Hunter of Electric Literature, translator Susan Bernofsky, Ben Greenman, Matthea Harvey, Amy Sohn, and more; hosted by Katie Halper.

This is free, open to the public, and should be a lot of fun . . .

Daniel Brunet for The Last Fire, a play by Dea Loher that examines the devastation wrought on a small community by the accidental death of a child. Following its premiere in Hamburg in 2008, it won both the 2008 Play of the Year award from Theater Heute and the 2008 Mülheim Drama Prize. (No publisher)

Alexander Dawe for a collection of short stories by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpmar (1901-1962), “the most surprising writer of 20th-century Turkish literature.” Opulent and lyrical in tone, Tanpmar’s stories orchestrate Western and Eastern influences to speak of ordinary people torn by their allegiances to the past. (No publisher)

Peter Golub for a collection of flash fictions by Linor Goralik, an underground Russian author beginning to make a name for herself in the literary mainstream. These very short stories catch their characters in midflight, like strangers on an airplane, combining the mythic with the banal to startling effect, as when the wolf, disobeying doctor’s orders, steps out for one last visit to the three little pigs. (No publisher)

Piotr Gwiazda for Kopenhaga by Grzegorz Wroblewski, a Polish poet who has lived in Copenhagen since 1985, “far from Poland and far from Denmark.” Intimate, sarcastic, lucid, and uncompromising, Kopenhaga addresses the immigrant experience in post-Cold War Europe with documentary evidence and intellectual rigor. (No publisher)

David Hull for Waverings, a novel by Mao Dun (1896-1981), who joined the nascent Chinese Communist Party in 1921. A depiction of the failed revolution of 1927 set among workers, peasants, and Communist Party officials in an unnamed county seat in Hubei Province, Waverings won its author great acclaim, but its pessimism drew criticism from doctrinaire Communists. Hull’s translation is based on both the 1928 edition, published immediately after the events the novel describes, and the 1958 edition, significantly altered by the author. (No publisher)

Akinloye A. Ojo for Afaimo and other Poems (1972) the only poetry collection by Akinwumi Isola, a novelist, playwright, and one of the foremost figures in Yorùbá literature. Moving between exhortatory matter-of-factness and ecstatic incantation, these poems are a love song to the language they were written in. “Is it really my fault? / The bug that ate the vegetable isn’t guilty. / There is a limit to a plant’s beauty. Whoever pursues Àsúnlé is guiltless.” (No U.S. publisher)

Angela Rodel for Holy Light, stories by Georgi Tenev, a Bulgarian playwright, novelist, film/TV screenwriter, and talk show host. Alloying political sci-fi with striking eroticism, the stories in Holy Light depict a world of endless, wearying revolution and apocalypse, where bodies have succumbed to a sinister bio-politics of relentless cruelty and perversion. “In first class they offered easy emancipation, perhaps even electrocution, but he was traveling economy class where they wouldn’t even serve him food.” (No publisher)

Margo Rosen for Poetry and Untruth, a novel by Anatoly Naiman. Juxtaposing the fates of four Russian poets of the early 20th century (Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva) with those of the generation that came of age during Khrushchev’s thaw, this is part novel, part historical document. It draws from the writings of Russia’s greatest poets and the author’s own experience (he was Akhmatova’s literary secretary from 1962-1966) to convey a century of creative life that transcends the direness of Soviet history. (No publisher)

Chip Rossetti for Animals in Our Days, short stories by Mohamad Makhzangi, an Egyptian psychiatrist, journalist and fiction writer who was studying alternative medicine in Kiev during the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Drawing on Arabic traditions of animal fables, these stories, written with “translucent poetic sensibility,” use animals to comment on political oppression and the human capacity for encountering the magical and the inexplicable. (To be published by the American University in Cairo Press.)

Bilal Tanweer for Love in Chikiwara (And Other Such Adventures), a 1964 novel by Muhammad Khalid Akhtar (1920-2002)that has long been considered a masterpiece of Urdu humor. Our narrator, a genial, gullible bakery owner, makes the serious mistake of befriending Qurban Ali Kattar, the “Thomas Hardy of Urdu Literature,” who shamelessly exploits his hero-worship of all writers. A supporting cast of religious scam artists, bookbinders, restaurant owners, butchers, and minor deities make this novel something new and strange and warmly welcoming. (No publisher)

Diane Thiel for The Great Green, a 1987 novel by Eugenia Fakinou. Hugely popular in Greece (where it is now in its 43rd reprint), The Great Green portrays a woman escaping the constrictions of family and societal expectations. It interweaves the whole span of Greek history, from the Minoans and Homer’s Achaeans to the late Byzantine and early 19th-century periods, into the story of a single day in our own time, when an unknown woman mysteriously appears in a Greek village.

from on .

Title: On the Edge – Writing in Post-Reunified Germany
When: Friday, May 1, 6–7:30 p.m.
Where: Deutsches Haus, 42 Washington Mews

You can get the full info , but what that page doesn’t yet tell you is that this event now features and Chad (who will be playing the roles of moderator and special guest).

Why the change-up, you ask? Why, worries about swine flu, of course. But due to our extreme caution, this event is now the ONLY PLACE YOU WILL NOT CATCH SWINE FLU. And, seriously, it’s bound to be interesting and a lot of fun, too.

Applications for grants from the PEN Translation Fund are . Grants range from $2,000 to $10,000 and support the translation of book-length works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or drama that have not previously appeared in English or have appeared only in an egregiously flawed translation.

In addition to financial assistance, grants from the PEN Translation Fund provide a good bit of publicity: recognition by the Fund has led on numerous occasions to a publishing contract. Translations supported by PEN grants have been excerpted in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review— and, of course, in PEN America. Making Histories included a great piece from Theremin, a play by Petr Zelenka translated by Stepan Simek.

The Three Musketeers Reunited:
Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa

When: Friday, May 2
bq. Where: 92nd St. Y: New York City
bq. What time: 7:30 p.m.

PEN is excited to make the first event announcement of the 2008 World Voices Festival. The event will feature three literary heavyweights appearing at the 92nd Street Y for a special repeat performance. On October 10, 1995, London’s Royal Festival Hall hosted a historic night of readings by three of the world’s most distinguished writers: Umberto Eco from Italy, British-Indian Salman Rushdie, and Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru. At dinner afterwards, Eco anointed the trio as The Three Musketeers. Now, twelve years later, the PEN World Voices Festival, in collaboration with the Poetry Center, is proud to present The Three Musketeers together again for one unforgettable evening.

The Three Musketeers Reunited will take place on May 2 at 7:30 p.m. at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

On November 15 each year International PEN stages the . PEN members do what they can to “raise public awareness of the plight of their colleagues worldwide,” writing protest appeals, staging events, and calling attention to imprisoned writers around the globe. Five writers in particular are selected “to represent the global spread of the problems as well as to illustrate the types of attacks.”

This year, the five writers are: Zargana (Myanmar/Burma), Normando Hernández González (Cuba), Fatou Jaw Manneh (Gambia), Yaghoub Yadali (Iran), and Dzamshid Karimov (Uzbekistan).