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Home > Features > 2008 Year in Review

2008 IN REVIEW

2008 has been a record year for PEN, with more events, advocacy work, and publications than ever. Below, check out some of our favorite parts of 2008, with original audio recordings, photos, and writing documenting some the year's truly memorable moments.

AUDIO HIGHLIGHTS

Chimamanda Adichie on growing up with Things Fall Apart

Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro on imprisoned poet U Win Tin

Edward Albee reads "Nightmare" by Shen Youlian

Russell Banks reads "How Big a Character is Xin" by Hu Shigen

Chris Abani on Chinua Achebe

Orhan Pamuk & Kiran Desai on the press in Burma

Ian McEwan on global warming and human nature

Jeffrey Eugenides reads Robert Walser's "Trousers"

Jonathan Ames performs "I Called Myself El Cid"

Annie Proulx performs "A Yard of Cloth: The Untold Story of How a Fragment of Probably Hijacked Fabric Saved the Lives of Two Middle-aged Sisters in Northern New England on the Banks of the Pemijawasik River In 1988"

Rian Malan on growing up in South Africa

Allison Hedge Coke reads from Naeem Murr's The Perfect Man

Amiri Baraka reads "Rhythm Travel"

Ian McEwan and Steven Pinker in conversation

Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, and Mario Vargas Llosa in conversation with Leonard Lopate

PHOTOS

>> Select photos

FICTION 2

Myth Milk
by Etgar Keret

Song for Night
by Chris Abani


Conrad Loomis & the Clothes Ray

by Amiri Baraka


Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Translated by Katherine Silver

Mister Brecht
by Gonçalo M. Tavares

Soap and Ambergris
by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

Hook Island Traveller
by Chris Everly

POETRY 2

Meanwhile Take My Hand, by Kirmen Uribe
Translated by Elizabeth Macklin

Mahmoud Darwish: Poems
by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah

Prison Eulogies
by Yvette Louisell

The Night, by Jaime Saenz
Translated by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson

Proof of Kindness, Checkpoint
by Fady Joudah

DRAMA

The Clean House
By Sarah Ruhl

DIARIES AND TESTIMONIALS

Ernest Rich: A Prison Diary

Baghdad, Damascus, Atlanta
by Ahmed Ali

Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, by Kang Zhengguo
Translated by Susan Wilf

Days of Illegal Detention
by Li Jianhong

Nightmare
by Shen Youlian

The Public-Toilet Manager
by Liao Yiwu; translated by Wen Huang

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