PEN America 10: Fear Itself

What are you so afraid of? At this moment of unease and anxiety, PEN America 10: Fear Itself examines—through fiction, poetry, drama, essays, and conversations—the subject of fear in all its guises. Edward Albee, Edwidge Danticat, and others think about what fear means to them; Yoshihiro Tatsumi depicts hell; a detainee describes Guantánamo; and Studs Terkel listens to stories of the Depression. Plus new fiction from Lydia Davis and Etgar Keret, poems from Burma, fiction from Mexico—and much, much more.

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Edward Albee • Edwidge Danticat • T Cooper
Maggie Nelson  • Nawal El Saadawi
Paul LaFarge • Patricia Spears Jones

The Flood Notebooks
by Nicole Cooley

Poems
by Christian Hawkey

Scorched Maps
by Tomasz Rozycki

Being Saïd
by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

Ladies and gentlemen, we will now perform the final scene of the play and then call it a night. Hopefully, we can squeeze out some sort of resolution from it. I will play Saïd as Saïd really was in 1980. [More]

Save Me from the Pious and the Vengeful
by Lynne Tillman

A Collaborator in Kashmir
by Amitava Kumar

Hell
by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Seven Small Apocalypses
by Lucy Corin

I drive by a motel when I need anything from the other side of town. Town’s built like an hourglass, and there’s a big lit sun shining from the motel sign. [More]

Rosie’s Bridegroom
by Petina Gappah

The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie’s bridegroom. They look at Rosie’s own lips, which owe their reddish pinkness to artifice, they think, and not disease. [More]

Révolution et literature
by Rawi Hage

I spotted Professor Youssef sitting at his usual table. That lazy, pretentious, Algerian pseudo-French intellectual always dresses up in gabardine suits with the same thin tie that had its glory in the ’70s. [More]

Memories of the Decadence
by Hari Kunzru

At the beginning of the Decadence it was easy. Although we were bored, and though everything had been done before, we were seized with a peculiar sense of potential. [More]