PEN World Voices is one of my favorite weeks in the literary year. I'm making a list of events I want to cover, and also preparing to talk about Sherman Alexie at the National Book Critics Circle panel on Friday April 30 at 1 pm at the Austrian Cultural Center. (I'm moderating a conversation about writers at this year's festival, with Rigoberto Gonzalez, who will talk about Mexican novelist Martin Solares; Eric Banks, who will discuss German-language writers, and Mary Ann Newman, who will discuss Catalan author Quim Monzo.)
Monday night's launch at WNYC, with Claire Messud moderating a panel including Lorraine Adams, Andrea Levy, and Norman Rush, bouncing off her Guernica guest edited edition on women, sex and fiction, and looks like a...
I'm fascinated by curious juxtapositions, which always get me thinking, and this week presented an intriguing one. First, and most sadly, J.D. Salinger passed away, a man as famous for hating being famous as he was for writing "The Catcher in the Rye." Second, Martin Levin, Books Editor for The Globe and Mail, wrote an article entitled, "You suck, and so does your writing" wherein he bemoans the fact Canadian writers aren't more brutal (and witty) in their invective against one another.
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Now, I know Martin Levin slightly, and look forward to getting to know him better, and admire him immensely, and...
A Man Born Blind
John 9:1-4
Jesus and his disciples passed a man blind from birth and his disciples asked who sinned. Some Rabbis taught that there was no suffering without sin so Jesus’ troubled disciples asked whether he was blind because his parents sinned or because a fetus could sin in the womb. Jesus said that the man had been blind from birth so that God’s work could be revealed through him.
That troubled me as a child, that someone was blind from birth so that Jesus could heal him. Later I rationalized that I was blind to many things because I took them for granted, but being blind from birth everything this man saw was a miracle. Not just his first sight but everything he...
Best Known Christian of the Twentieth Century
The best known Christian of the twentieth century was not Albert Sweitzer, Mother Teresa, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Billy Graham or Martin Luther King, Jr. The best known Christian of the Twentieth Century was Adolf Hitler. In December 1941, he said, “If I live my life according to my God-given insights, then I cannot go wrong, and even if I do, I know I have acted in good faith.”
No present politician has more blatantly declared his Christianity than Adolf Hitler and since Hitler the faith of no politician has been so widely accepted. Millions of Christians around the world admired him. In Austria priests were authorized to display the swastika. Some bishops wrote “Heil...
The prospect of sitting through an evening of ten--count ‘em, ten--readings in one evening was a bit daunting, even given the impressive array of talent on display last night at Town Hall.
Thankfully, introductions were dispensed with. Each writer merely appeared onstage one after the other, and if there was any question as to who they were, you simply referred to the program guides handed out by ushers as you walked in.
First up was Steve Martin, reading from his to-be published memoir of his beginnings as a stand-up comic. True to form, Martin was his funny, self-deprecating self. Also, as a writer closer to the beginning of his career than the end of it, I was reassured to hear that even...
In an age of mass migration,when human herds cross borders in flight from conflict, poverty, disease, violence, what is home? How and where do we find it?
Nadine Gordimer, the penultimate reader in last night's PEN readings on "Writing Home," spoke of the millions of refugees from wars and conflicts. Silver-haired, dressed in gray, with a long white-bordered stole, she drew the photographers from the shadows at Town Hall. Just before reading the first sentence of her powerful story "The Ultimate Safari," she said, "Forget about me, the old woman. It's being narrated by an eleven year old girl." Her narrator's mother has disappeared and her father is in the civil war in Mozambique. With her grandparents and two brothers, she makes the...
