PEN American Center - Public Lives/Private Lives

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This year’s theme of Public Lives/Private Lives couldn't be more timely. How do we draw a line between our private and public selves? When must we tell private stories for the public good? Do we need to redefine the meaning of public and private in the 21st century?

In the lead-up to this year’s PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, Festival authors explore this year's theme of Public Lives/Private Lives.

Festival authors: contribute your writing to this collection.

A Morning in Brooklyn
by Susan Bernofsky

It is too early yet to be awake. In a dream / just now I walked / through a house I once lived in . . . [More]

Horacio Castellanos Moya on Public Lives/Private Lives 1 Apuntes/Notes/Notes/Notizen
by Horacio Castellanos Moya

No poseo nada: ni casa, ni auto, ni habitación, ni una cama. Vivo de paso y de prestado.

I own nothing: no house, no car, no room, not even a bed. I wander from place to place and live from hand to mouth. [More]

Tina Chang on Public Lives/Private Lives Selected Poems
by Tina Chang

Labor

My handwriting is rough, a prisoner’s scripted / letter, the cropped fields and your winter hands. . . [More]

György Dragomán on Public Lives/Private Lives The Day of the Typewriters
by György Dragomán

I spent my childhood in socialist Romania. In 1983 I learned that the two most dangerous objects in our household were my father's air-gun and his typewriter. [More]

Forrest Gander on Public Lives/Private Lives Evaporation 1
by Forrest Gander

It’s not an insult to refuse to drain the glass, she tells me / And a fly crawls from the bowl of sauza picante. [More]

Arnon Grunberg on Public Lives/Private Lives Clean Sheets
by Arnon Grunberg

At Hotel G. they have three kinds of garbage: paper, plastic and Schweinefutter. [More]

Brian Henry on Public Lives/Private Lives Selected Poems
by Brian Henry

Decomposition by the Ljubljanica

The tower with its clock & flag / clicks & flaps above the riverlet . . . [More]

Lieve Joris on Public Lives/Private Lives Village Rumors
by Lieve Joris

A few weeks ago, the phone rang at 11:45 pm in my home in Amsterdam. It was my friend Vincent, who’s been living in Sweden since he fled Congo some fifteen years ago. [More]

Irakli Kakabadze on Public Lives/Private Lives Information Highway Song
by Irakli Kakabadze

I got lost on Information Highway, / When I looked for a simple and unsophisticated my way! [More]

Michael Krüger on Public Lives/Private Lives Public Lives/Private Lives
by Michael Krüger

Media, the Internet, YouTube: the last step in our narcissistic and political development to expose our private life in public will be the publication of our genetic code. [More]

Amanda Michalopoulou on Public Lives/Private Lives About Private (Writing) Life
by Amanda Michalopoulou

After readings, people usually ask me if what I read was true. And I repeat that if autobiography is, as Henry James put it, “the atmosphere of the mind” then yes, my stories are referring to life events. [More]

Chiori Miyagawa on Public Lives/Private Lives Water Rice Memory
by Chiori Miyagawa

There was something suspicious about the death of Yokochi City’s mayor’s daughter. [More]

Antonio Monda on Public Lives/Private Lives Public Lives/Private Lives
by Antonio Monda

I believe that one of the most problematic and fascinating conflicts of our time is the relationship between our intimate beliefs and our public life. [More]

Idra Novey on Public Lives/Private Lives Selected Poems
by Idra Novey

Pausing Outside a House
Santiago, Chile 2005

Here, where a ruin longs
to be a house, and a house
to be left to ruin.
[More]

Kristín Ómarsdóttir on Public Lives/Private Lives American Eyes
by Kristín Ómarsdóttir

Every day as a child I looked at a yellow box of American cereal while I enjoyed my breakfast at an American kitchen table at my home, in a house in Hafnarfjörður; a small town eight miles from Reykjavík, Iceland. [More]

Jutta Richter on Public Lives/Private Lives Weihnachten
by Jutta Richter

Was würdest Du machen, wenn Weihnachten wär' / und kein Engel würde singen. / Es gäbe auch keine Geschenke mehr, / kein >Süsser-die-Glocken-nie-kIingen<. [More]

Evelyn Schlag on Public Lives/Private Lives Woman Reading a Letter
by Evelyn Schlag

She stands in profile at the window / From which we only see the light . . . [More]

Ravi Shankar on Public Lives/Private Lives Surface Tension
by Ravi Shankar

Scarified now but how? When we once heard / parades from windows, swayed in artificially / luminescent reeds under the Brooklyn Bridge . . . [More]

Caridad Svich on Public Lives/Private Lives Vestige
by Caridad Svich

Shelled in fear / beneath a pile of shells / I pretend I'm dead / and wait for the gunfire to stop . . . [More]

Gonçalo Tavares on Public Lives/Private Lives Mister Brecht
by Gonçalo M. Tavares

One day, in a certain country, a man with two heads appeared. He was considered to be a monster, and not a man. [More]

Juan Gabriel Vásquez on Public Lives/Private Lives On Writing The Informers
by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

In 1999, four or five days before the end of the century, I met a woman of German-Jewish origin who had arrived in Colombia in 1938. [More]


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