
Caro Llewellyn, PEN World Voices director
Yes, the lineup for the sixth annual PEN World Voices festival of international literature has just been announced, and it’s sexy. Sexy in the way that librarian hair and geek glasses are sexy. The folk from PEN were at the Instituto Cervantes in midtown earlier today, plying the assembled crowd with Spanish wine and empanadas, and talking about the literary treats that await New Yorkers when the whole shebang kicks off on April 26.
Festival participants include such literati as Salman Rushdie (who’s also the festival’s chair), Richard Ford, Sebastian Junger, Adam Gopnik, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, Ben Okri, Mohsin Hamid, A.M. Homes, Sherman Alexie and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. Patti Smith and Brooklyn’s own Jonathan Lethem will be in the same room at the same time, talking to each other, and you can watch. Natalie Merchant will sing snippets from her latest album at the fourth annual PEN Cabaret.
All told, more than 150 authors, translators, editors and performers will add their voices to the throng, coming to the city from Europe, Chile, Russia, the Middle East, India, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Nigeria, China, Mexico and, of course, the rest of the U.S. Many of the events are free, while some are ticketed. Tickets have a habit of selling out, so consider yourself warned: Get your order in now.
Pen World Voices Festival of International Literature, various venues, Apr 26 - May 2, 2010. See www.pen.org/festival for details.









Gaitskill’s 2009 story collection, Don’t Cry, evokes raw emotional states with beautiful linguistic control, and glimpses the chaos that lies just beyond everyday human behavior. For her, even a serial killer’s crimes are part of a rational grid; her stories aim for states that aren’t subject to control, like joy and vulnerability and terror. The tensions in her intensely crafted work make her a great writer, but
Once an obscure poet, Rae Armantrout is now reaching a larger audience (often in the pages of The New Yorker) with her elliptical, oblique narratives. And that audience is about to get bigger. Last week, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. You can catch her in the flesh 
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David Shields, the author of
Author Barry Hannah is 
When we saw Ed Park read
Writer and academic André Aciman had to field some pretty weighty questions last night: “What’s the meaning of literature, and has it changed over time?” was NYPL president Paul Leclerc’s opener, which was greeted with laughter from Aciman. “I’m not going to touch on that” he said, before talking about the things that stay, in a literary sense at least, omnipresent: love and war. His latest book, Eight White Nights, is firmly in the former camp: it’s the story of a couple whose love life plays out over one week on the Upper West Side.
At this point, The Paris Review is probably best known for its in-depth author interviews (many of which are available 
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To a broad swath of readers and writers 

