Maybe because English is also a second language for me, Saturday’s event on the importance of translation struck a particularly resonant chord. To promote the first collection of Dalkey Archive’s new “Best European Fiction” series, novelist and editor Aleksandar Hemon joined the stage with Colum McCann, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, valter hugo mãe, and Naja...

            Another dark space for a reading and a literary discussion: Le Poisson Rouge, packed, and with little red candles flickering on the low tables. I love the Poisson Rouge, and it turns out to be as good a setting for literature as it is for music....

“Face to Face: Confronting the Torturers”—streamed on the PEN Web site to audiences worldwide—was a 90-minute, late-night program of readings at Joe’s Pub, a cabaret venue associated with The Public Theater, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Squeezed against the bar or one of the little tables, one could settle into a “classic gimlet,” accompanied by a “classic bruschetta with tomatoes,” while imbibing 11 tales of classic horror. I was able to stay for all but the last of the readers (the American writer Randa Jarrar, who read “Revenge,” by the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali); I also never got to hear the promised remarks by Jameel Jaffer, of the co-sponsoring ACLU. Given the fact of the ACLU’s participation, I expected to hear...

2nd PEN Cabaret. Saturday night, May 3, Webster Hall.

The disembodied voice of Hungarian singer Bea Palya filled the darkness at the venerable night club Webster Hall as she emerged from the back alongside the audience, singing raw, no microphone, no spotlight, in a chillingly eloquent voice. She was the most self-contained of all the performers at PEN's second cabaret. (Writers, containing multitudes, are rarely as comfortable within their own fleshly bodies as she.) Palya took a microphone, singing playfully in front of the first table (where Rick Moody slumped as if to escape the unexpected shared spotlight, although he was onstage later with John Wesley Harding, aka novelist Wesley Stace)).

Palya took the stage, taught the audience to sing and clap along (not ready for floor stamping,...