As part of the 2008 PEN World Voices Festival, festival participants explore this year's World Voices theme: Public Lives/Private Lives.

This year’s theme could hardly be more timely. In an era of globalization and electronic media, we now have instantaneous access to news and information from around the globe, as well as ways to instantly share ourselves with the rest of the world. Alongside growing concerns about surveillance and free expression are issues of celebrity, privacy, communication saturation, and the distortion of the public and the private.

Festival authors: contribute your writing to this collection.

Susan Bernofsky: A Morning in Brooklyn
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: Apuntes/Notes/Notes/Notizen
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: Poems
Labor

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

György Dragomán: The Day of the Typewriters
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: Evaporation 1
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: Clean Sheets
At Hotel G. they have three kinds of garbage: paper, plastic and Schweinefutter. [More]


Brian Henry: Poems
Decomposition by the Ljubljanica

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

Lieve Joris: Village Rumors
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: Information Highway Song
I got lost on Information Highway, / When I looked for a simple and unsophisticated my way! [More]


Michael Krüger on Public Lives/Private Lives
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: About Private (Writing) Life
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: WaterRice Memory
There was something suspicious about the death of Yokochi City’s mayor’s daughter. [More]


Antonio Monda on Public Lives/Private Lives
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: Poems
  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: American Eyes
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: Weihnachten
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: Woman Reading a Letter
She stands in profile at the window / From which we only see the light . . . [More]

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

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


Gonçalo Tavares: Mister Brecht
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 Writing The Informers
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]