When: Thursday, May 1
Where: Joe’s Pub: 425 Lafayette St.
What time: 9 p.m.

With György Dragomán, Hasan Elahi, Asli Erdogan, Péter Esterházy, Chenjerai Hove, Irakli Kakabadze, Jenny Marketou, Ivy Meeropol, Francine Prose, and Ingo Schulze

Tickets: $10/$8 PEN and ACLU members

Purchase tickets from Joe’s Pub: www.joespub.com or (212) 967-5555

Cosponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union

Join international and local guests for a special reading designed to provoke reflection on controversial post-9/11 government surveillance programs in the United States.

PEN’s Campaign for Core Freedoms has joined with the American Civil Liberties Union and other leading human-rights organizations to challenge some of the government’s most pernicious infringements on basic human rights, working to restore privacy protections for bookstore and library records, fighting to end the FBI’s unchecked use of National Security Letters, and challenging warrantless telephone and Internet surveillance by the N.S.A. Writers will read from works that illuminate the ways government surveillance threatens artistic and intellectual freedom.