PEN president K. Anthony Appiah was the eloquent master of ceremonies on Saturday afternoon, unruffled despite flaws in the sound system, as the venerable and stately Toni Morrison, reigning US Nobel laureate, in a remarkable show of writerly generosity, came...
The panel on Faith and Fiction was the one I most wanted to attend. I disagree with the premise that fiction is make-believe and faith is must believe. Fiction is far more than make-believe. Some fiction presents a truer picture of the world than television, movies or newspapers. When Marlon James asked a German historian the source for his description of life in 19th Century Germany, the historian said it was from novels.
Some fiction requires suspension of belief, as does a fable or parable, but fiction goes to the dark side to test, identify, clarify with the ultimate purpose of redemption. Hamlet is must-believe at the end. So is Crime and Punishment, the parables of Jesus, the fables of Aesop, the stories of Franz Kafka....
The event was "The Voyage of the Reader: Using Children's Books to Create a Lifelong Love of Reading" with participants Meir Shalev, Francine Prose, Vera Williams and Mary Ann Hoberman, moderated by Benjamin Schrank. The room at Instituto Cervantes crackled with two kinds of excitement. The first had to do with the extraordinary new world we live in, where the digital revolution has swept away old certainties about publishing and reading. The big question was whether or not authors would be able to hold onto young readers in the electronic world. Mary Ann Hoberman wondered what she was doing on the panel as she was clearly floored by a Wall Street Journal article, “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write,” Ben...
Four novelists-Arthur Japin, Laila Lalami, Michael Wallner and Imma Monso-took on the question of their relationship to historical and personal events. Colum McCann moderated the panel with wit and generosity. Of the four I was only familiar with the work Laila LaLami's fiction (Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits) so it was treat to be introduced to three new writers-Japin from The Netherlands , Wallner from Germany and Monso from Spain. This panel was one I was really excited to attend because it twined most specifically with questions with which I've been grappling in the novel I've just published The Border of Truth. The novel is both based on a refugee/ship situation in 1940. My father was aboard the "real" ship and one of...
