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Home > Membership > Recent Publications

RECENT PEN MEMBER PUBLICATIONS (A-Z)

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Allan Graubard: Invisible Heads: Surrealists in North America -- An Untold Story

(Anon Edition, August 2011)

Description: Surrealism in North America has a fractured history, with several arcs of continuity. Here is the story of one collective that evolves in five cities through various groups over four decades. Poets, artists, dance theater and theatre creators, photographers, composers, sculptors, inventors, critics, and seekers - friends and colleagues all - their oeuvres and interventions track their effort to refine a revolutionary poetic presence precise to time and place: a living adaptive force that flowers from marvelous encounters, discoveries, and collaborations. Essential to understanding the fate of surrealism in North America, this history has now found its voice and compass, just beyond the limits set by the past. Richly illustrated, with texts, poems, games, and commentary . . . Enter and leave as you please ... in 2 volumes ....

David Hellerstein: Heal Your Brain: How the New Neuropsychiatry Can Help You Go From Better to Well

(Johns Hopkins University Press, March 2011)

Description: Dr. Hellerstein uses the term "New Neuropsychiatry" to refer to an emerging synthesis of neuroscience and clinical psychiatric practice that increasingly is able to help people who have depression and anxiety disorders. Depression and anxiety disorders damage the brain, but as Dr. Hellerstein explains, the right treatment can change the patterns of brain activity, brain cell connections, and even the brain's anatomy. Unlike traditional psychiatry, which often focused on early life issues, the New Neuropsychiatry focuses on improving present-day life and on achieving long-term remission of symptoms. Heal Your Brain combines the advances of neuroscience and medicine with the art of the storyteller to show how the New Neuropsychiatry can alter the outcome of these often-devastating disorders.

Leora Skolkin-Smith: Hystera

(Fiction Studio Books, November 2011)

Description: Set in the turbulent 1970s when Patty Hearst became Tanya the Revolutionary, Hystera is a timeless story of madness, yearning, and identity. After a fatal accident takes her father away, Lillian Wiell blames herself for the family tragedy. Tripping through failed love affairs with men, and doomed friendships, all Lilly wants is to be sheltered from reality. She retreats from the outside world into a world of delusion and the private terrors of a New York City Psychiatric Hospital. Unreachable behind her thick wall  of fears, the world of hospital corridors and strangers become a vessell of faith. She is a foreigner there until her fellow patients release her from her isolation with the power of human intimacy. How do we know who we really are?  How do we find our true selves under the heavy burden of family and our pasts?  In an unpredictable portrait of mental illness Hystera penetrates to the pulsing heart of the questions.

Allan Graubard: And tell tulip the summer

(Quattro Books, October 2011)

Description: And tell tulip the summer charts a journey over several continents amidst the turmoil and conflict that mark our time. Episodic, combustive, lyrical and urbane, its poems capture the world we know. From the Balkans, still traumatized by the after-effects of war, to the Sahel, where sand and sky compel extreme disjunctions, to Paris and New York, where culture and commerce dance their deadly tango, or Cajun Louisiana, where rice and cane farmers struggle to survive, the book unfolds our storied map. A graceful, dark, humorous prism that refracts writer and reader alike.

Carmela Ciuraru: Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms

(HarperCollins, July 2011)

Description: Nom de Plume explores the fascinating stories of more than a dozen authorial imposters across centuries and cultures, plumbing the creative process and the darker, often crippling aspects of fame. A wide-ranging exploration of pseudonyms both familiar and obscure, Nom de Plume is part detective story, part exposé, part literary history, and an absorbing psychological meditation on identity.

Catherine Cauvin-Higgins: Farewell

(AmazonCrossing, August 2011)

Description: This is a translation from the French of a Cold War espionage story, very little known in its entirety, which took thirty years to reach the American public, although it had a big impact on U.S. policies in the 80s, contributing to the collapse of the Soviet regime.  The authors Sergei Kostin and Eric Raynaud  have spent years to investigate the Farewell dossier which shows that reality often goes beyond fiction.  The French title is Adieu Farewell (Laffont, Paris, 2009). A movie has been released in 2009, based on a script by E. Raynaud, now available in DVD, starring Kusturica as Farewell. Thirty years after the events, the film and the book have not been, and may never be, released in Russia.

Margaret Bald: From the Sahara to Samarkand: Selected Travel Writings of Rosita Forbes, 1919-1937

(Axios Press, 2010)

Description: In the 1920s and ’30s, the extraordinary Rosita Forbes explored the Libyan desert, sailed across the Red Sea to Yemen, trekked more than a thousand miles into remote Abyssinia, and traveled in Southeast Asia and China, Morocco, Turkey, Iraq, Persia, and Afghanistan. She wrote some thirty books about these and other journeys, was a widely published journalist, a documentary filmmaker, and the editor of a pioneering women’s magazine. Forbes was also a Jazz Age style icon, known as much for her glamour and charm as for her splendid adventures and the engaging and insightful books she wrote about them. This is the first anthology of her travel writing, with an introduction to her life and work by Margaret Bald.

“What an astonishing book this is! Rosita Forbes was not just intrepid but extremely intelligent, not just adventurous but deeply curious, not just a fine writer but a shrewd and sympathetic observer as well. It’s rare to find a person at once so iconoclastic, unconventional and fearless and yet so attuned to her fellow human beings across the globe.” -- Rosemary Mahoney (author of Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff)

Pesi Dinnerstein: A Cluttered Life: Searching for God, Serenity, and My Missing Keys

(Seal Press, August 2011)

Description: A Cluttered Life: Searching for God, Serenity, and My Missing Keys is the story of Pesi Dinnerstein’s quest to create a simple and orderly life, only to discover that simplicity is not so simple and what constitutes clutter is not always perfectly clear.  Along the way—with the help of devoted friends, a twelve-step recovery program, and a bit of Kabbalistic wisdom—her battle with chaos is transformed into an unexpected journey of self-discovery and spiritual awakening.

Yuliana Kim-Grant: A Shred of Hope

(Aberdeen Bay Publishing, May 2011)

Description: An inexplicable tragedy striking a young Korean-American woman, Jane Park, and her African American husband, Terence Patterson, defines the endpoint of this exquisite mosaic of a novel. Their murder leads back to the equally heartbreaking emotions that estranged Jane from her parents—and then forward to the rescue of Terence's family from a death of an entirely different kind. The Parks rejected Terence because of his color; the Pattersons accepted Jane without qualification, and yet neither family has the advantage in facing the future. Beverly Patterson wears her grief over her son's death like armor, even as her daughter fades to a shadow. Mrs Park, so bound to her husband that even her first name seems gratuitous, finally gathers the courage that allows them all to interrupt the cycle that is inexorably cutting them off from each other—Park from Park, Patterson from Patterson. A Shred of Hope is balanced on the intricate, exquisitely delineated interplay of these two mothers, separated by their traditions but united by their loss.

Each moment of Yuliana Kim-Grant's novel is strikingly unique and recognizably familiar as her characters stray into—and out of—emotional territory that they never wanted nor planned. Her compassionate but unflinting portrait turns the opaque rock of the lives of the Parks and the Pattersons into the translucent diamond formed by A Shred of Hope.

Meena Alexander: Poetics of Dislocation

(University of Michigan Press, Dec 2009)

Description: Poetics of Dislocation sets the work of contemporary American poetry within the streams of migration that have made the nation what it is in the 21st century. There are few poets better qualified to muse on that context than Meena Alexander, who spent her life studying at prestigious institutions around the globe before settling in the United States to work on her acclaimed body of poetry.

Part of the University of Michigan Press's award-winning Poets on Poetry series, Poetics of Dislocation studies not only the personal creative process Alexander uses, but also the work of other prominent writers. Alexander discusses what it means to come to America as an adult to write poetry, and her place—and that of others—in the collection of cultures that makes up this country. She outlines the dilemmas that face modern immigrant poets, including how to make a place for oneself in a new society and how to write poetry in a time of violence worldwide.

Adele Annesi: "After Sunflowers" in Press Pause Moments: Essays About Life Transitions by Women Writers

(Kiwi Publishing, Sept. 2010)

Description: Adele Annesi's essay "After Sunflowers" has appeared in the collection Press Pause Moments: Essays About Life Transitions by Women Writers, compiled and edited by Anne Witkavitch. In this collection, thirty-six women writers reflect upon change, adversity and celebration.

"Anne Witkavitch has captured the power of storytelling in this wonderfully insightful collection of true tales by women who have pressed pause to listen to their hearts, head in a new direction and find greater happiness. Each essay in this anthology is revelatory. A must read for anyone contemplating a life change." - Prill Boyle, author of Defying Gravity

Allan Graubard: Roma Amor

(Spuyten Duyvil, June 2010)

Description: Roma Amor is a poetic novella that reinvents Rome for a few precious moments in the dream time. With photos by Ira Cohen and drawings by Thom Burns.

Edith Grossman: Why Translation Matters

(Yale University Press, 2010)

Description: Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation, and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator’s role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, “My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented.”

For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: “Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable.”

Throughout the four chapters of this bracing volume, Grossman’s belief in the crucial significance of the translator’s work, as well as her rare ability to explain the intellectual sphere that she inhabits as interpreter of the original text, inspires and provokes the reader to engage with translation in an entirely new way.

Patricia Grossman: Radiant Daughter

(Northwestern University Press, August 31, 2010)

Description: In Radiant Daughter, Patricia Grossman follows a Czech-American family for twenty-seven years, beginning in suburban Chicago in 1969 and ending in Brooklyn -- in seaside "Little Odessa" -- in 1996. Though the novel begins as a traditional assimilation story, it evolves into a highly particular and harrowing tale surrounding the descent of Elise Blazek, the family's brightest star. Radiant Daughter is also a story of translation-between generations, from the Czech of Irena and Stepan to the "American" of the children, and finally to the Russian that is Elise's academic specialty. Grossman's moving narrative breaks new ground in exploring a dangerous turn in the complex bond between a mother and her adult child.

Urayoan Noel: Hi-Density Politics

(BlazeVOX, October 2010)

Description: Hi-Density Politics proposes a laughtracked alternative to identity politics in a self-reflexive turn towards density: of language, of body, of urban and social space).

Here, the direct address of spoken-word meets experimental "ecriture" in the push and pull between forms and styles: a terza rima, a found poem, a poem in palindromes, various self-translations from the Spanish and the French, oral poems composed on a BlackBerry, and software-generated homophonic translations.

Riffing off Williams's most famous dictum, this book imagines a poetics attuned to one simple refrain: "No identity but in hi-density."

Albert Russo: Symphony in Hands Major and Celestial Blues Chants Du Ciel

Symphony in Hands major
(2010)

Description: Live hands, hands sculpted, woven or painted, from antiquity to our days, express the whole gamut of human emotions. Works by Albrecht Durer, Michelangelo, William Blake, Chagall, Picasso, and Lichtenstein.


Celestial Blues Chants Du Ciel
(2010)

Description: The author's photographs reveal the "tunes the sky plays over our heads." Watch the sky play its magic over cities and landscapes, from Norway to Italy, Senegal, Congo and Burundi, from Mexico to Russia, Israel and Jordan, from the north pole to the heart of the jungle.

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