Date: April 28th 2008

Apologies for the hard-to-read email.

Here is a clearer version.


PEN World Voices is a festival of international literature featuring 170 writers, 51 countries, and 82 events coming to venues across New York City, April 29-May 4th, 2008. Don't miss six days of exciting literary exchange with conversations, panel discussions, readings, film screenings, a translation slam and a cabaret night! For a complete schedule of events, go to: http://www.pen.org/festival

Soft Skull's author Asli Erdogan (City in Crimson Cloak) will be participating in several PEN World Voices events. Her schedule is pasted in here, and more about the book and the author can be found below.

------------------
THURSDAY May 1 | Writing Reality Under the Guard of Correction
Where: Elebash Recital Hall, The CUNY Graduate Center: 365 5th Ave.
What time: 3–4:30 p.m.

With Jennifer Egan, Asli Erdogan, Chenjerai Hove, and Barbara Parsons; moderated by Jackson Taylor
Free and open to the public. No reservations.
Cosponsored by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Prison forces people to conform to a new sense of what is public and what is private: solitary confinement and 24-hour surveillance, overcrowded facilities and individual cells, cacophonous noise and artificial light beyond the individual’s control. This panel will explore how writing can help form a psychological bridge between the public and the private self, what adaptations the private self must make in prison, the usefulness of writing in relieving those deforming pressures, and the availability, experience, purpose, and methods of writing instruction.

THURSDAY May 1 | Something to Hide: Writers and Artists Against the Surveillance State
Where: Joe’s Pub: 425 Lafayette St.
What time: 9 p.m.

With György Dragomán, Hasan Elahi, Asli Erdogan, Péter Esterházy, Chenjerai Hove, Irakli Kakabadze, Jenny Marketou, Ivy Meeropol, Francine Prose, and Ingo Schulze
Tickets: $10/$8 PEN and ACLU members
Purchase tickets from Joe’s Pub: www.joespub.com or (212) 967-5555
Cosponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union
Join international and local guests for a special reading designed to provoke reflection on controversial post-9/11 government surveillance programs in the United States.
PEN’s Campaign for Core Freedoms has joined with the American Civil Liberties Union and other leading human-rights organizations to challenge some of the government’s most pernicious infringements on basic human rights, working to restore privacy protections for bookstore and library records, fighting to end the FBI’s unchecked use of National Security Letters, and challenging warrantless telephone and Internet surveillance by the N.S.A. Writers will read from works that illuminate the ways government surveillance threatens artistic and intellectual freedom.

FRIDAY May 2 | Bookforum: Political Engagement
Where: Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center: 365 5th Ave.
What time: 1:30–3 p.m.

With Asli Erdogan, Nuruddin Farah, and Elias Khoury; moderated by Albert Mobilio
Free and open to the public. No reservations.
Cosponsored by Bookforum and the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, The Graduate Center, CUNY

To paraphrase Ezra Pound, whose own political views led to his indictment for treason, literature is news that stays news. Is contemporary fiction that kind of news? Indeed, what novels were ever pointedly relevant to public and political life? And how does such relevance jibe with Orwell’s notion that an “atmosphere of orthodoxy is always . . . completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature”? Is every novel by definition a social critique? Can we (and should we) ever separate an author’s politics from their aesthetic achievement?


SATURDAY May 3 | Do You Believe?
Where: Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center: 365 5th Ave.
What time: 4–5.30 p.m.

With Asli Erdogan, Rebecca Goldstein, Elias Khoury, and Antonio Muñoz Molina; moderated by Antonio Monda
Free and open to the public. No reservations.
Cosponsored by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, The Graduate Center, CUNY, and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy
According to Chekov, man is what he believes. The values and beliefs we hold in the privacy of our own hearts are projected into the larger world through our daily actions and behaviors. Antonio Monda, author of Do You Believe?, speaks with four international guests about god, religion, and what motivates their lives and literature.

-------------------

City in Crimson Cloak is the story of a young woman in Rio de Janeiro on the last day of her life—a remarkable novel from a writer named by Lire one of the top 50 writers to watch out for in the 21st century.

“Asli Erdogan is an exceptionally sensitive and perceptive writer who gives us perfect literary texts.”—Orhan Pamuk

“The description in Asli Erdogan’s novel is breathtaking. The work is so much like its setting. Deep. Complicated. Raw. Difficult. Musical. I never wanted to leave a scene yet I couldn’t wait for the next. This is a truly fine book.”—Percival Everett

One of Turkey’s most challenging young authors, Aslı Erdogan has been a critical success both in Turkey and Europe. A former physicist who abandoned her scientific career for a literary one, Erdoğan’s first book, the novel Kabuk Adam (The Shell Man), was published in 1994. She went on to make her mark abroad two years later when she received the Deutsche Welle Prize for her short story “The Wooden Birds.” Erdoğan has devoted herself to writing full-time since 1996 and the publication of a collection of her short stories and poetic prose entitled Mucizevi Mandarin (The Miraculous Mandarin).

From 1998 to 2000 Erdoğan, a human rights activist and former Turkish representative of PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee, wrote a column for the Turkish newspaper Radikal entitled “The Others”. Her articles were later collected and published as the book Bir Yolculuk Ne Zaman Biter (When a Journey Ends). Two of these articles are featured in the 2004 edition of M.E.E.T.’s journal.

Erdogan has also participated in various exhibitions both in Turkey and abroad, and has recently been a featured guest at international literary and arts events such as the Beaux Arts Festival in Brussels and the Kunstfestival in Antwerp, where she read together with Emine Sevgi Özdamar. A piece from her upcoming book was most recently staged by Serra Yılmaz in Italian at the Festival Teatro Europa Mediterraneo in Milan in October of this year.






--
To unsubscribe from: Soft Skull Shortwave, just follow this link:

http://www.softskull.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/u/Soft_Skull_Shortwave/

Click the link, or copy and paste the address into your browser.

Mailing List Powered by Dada Mail
http://www.softskull.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/what_is_dada_mail/