1  Imagine a book you wish had been written, either by yourself or by someone
else, living or dead, real or imaginary;

or

2  Tell us something you believe about books—their power or lack of it,
how they change the world or don’t, what they’ve done for you or failed
to do.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting the replies that appear in PEN America 11: Make Believe. We hope you’ll post your own replies as well.

A book I intended to write as soon as I retired was to be based on a journal I'd keep as I walked the stone-age path around Cornwall. I'd invite my three daughters, by then busy with their own lives, to join me for as many days as they could spare, sometimes singly, sometimes overlapping, and we'd walk and talk about our lives, especially the part we'd shared, from birth to young adult, and at sunset we'd turn inland and find a B&B in the nearest village and continue to talk. We'd cover their childhood in the city, when Central Park was their backyard, the sad years of family dissolution and the hard years of falling out of the middle class, they would hear my side of things as they hadn't before, and I would hear stories from them I had never guessed existed. BUT...when retirement came, my knee went, and such a walk was no longer possible. Still, that book seems so real to me that sometimes I think I've read it....

In a version of the famous story where Rumi meets his great teacher, Shams-e-Tabriz, the latter places the poet’s books in fire then takes them out, unburned. This is to show how spirit trumps the letter. Because this tale of writing rings true for me in the twenty-first century, I reproduce it in a ghazal, offering a fill-in-the-blank couplet ending for the reader to find his or her spiritual connection behind the words:

Now burn your useless books! You’ll learn much more
In schoolhouses of desire taught by _______________.

I wish Bruno Schulz had written a third book, or a fourth. Maybe he did and it got lost. No one knows for sure. Many writers have died before their time, but because of the horrific manner in which he was killed, and the genius of the two books he left us, I never cease to wonder what could have been. Imagine.

The book the world can't even imagine or dream of to help correct the incorrect course of history since Adam and Eve is soon-to-be-published on the net. KEKSI

Literature is perhaps the most demanding of the arts—demanding not only of its creators, but of those who read it as well. Unlike dancers or filmmakers or musicians, who ask only an hour or two of our time, writers ask people to sit in solitude for days, for weeks, word after word, page after page. Now, with so many modes of amusing oneself, so many ways of gathering information and filling time, books have gone from being virtually the only game in town to becoming perhaps the place people turn when all else has failed. Unless there is an unforeseen meltdown of the world’s technological infrastructure, writers will never again have the cultural primacy we once enjoyed.

Yet, attempts to introduce experiences from newer media are a poor idea, I think. Readers might not really want bells and whistles—they may come to books as a refuge from the flash and throb of the electronic age. Reading will be better served if we maintain our place outside the digital paradigm, and remain deliriously Luddite, our words as intimate as a whisper in the dark, the very thing that feeds the heart of our humanity.

I wish Layla Al-Attar had lived to write the autobiography of an artist in a time of war. To tell us what it was like to grow up in Iraq, to choose the artist’s life, to paint the bodies of women. To explain how you continue as an artist when people are starving and social injustice makes the human spirit smaller and smaller, to explain what art is responsible for.

There are books that tell stories like this: Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan, Memory for Forgetfulness by Mahmoud Darwish, Shoot an Iraqi by Wafaa Bilal and Kari Lydersen.

But really I wish Layla Al-Attar had lived. Because isn’t it possible that the book I dream of actually existed? Lying now in the ashes of a house destroyed by an American precision missile, so precise it left the houses on either side completely intact, ashes itself, drifting across oceans in the wind…

Stories and Lives

All of us have been charmed by a story, one day.
What happened to our lives, eversince?
Every age has its own stories, fragrances, and poems. There`s nothing more false than thinking our first childhood ends up with the growing-up changes. Somehow we remain still enchanted by those beautiful stories we`ve heard, and we build our lives directly upon those stories transforming them in life-scripts.
Maybe this is the reason I`ve always wanted to write a story continueing my favourite one.
You may not agree with me, but I think deconstructing and reconstructing our favourite childhood`s story means reinventing ourselves.

Isn`t literature beautiful, giving us opportunity to change our lives?

1. I wish I'd written "The Count of Monte Cristo". It has always been my favorite classic and I love the story of revenge told on such a grand scale. Watching how a many has everything he wanted with it all taken away, it shows an interesting form of "karma", while at the same time showing the dangers of being obsessed with your grudge.

2. Books have amazing powers, both good and bad. Books can transport you to other worlds, such as in The Lord of the Rings, and can paint a vivid picture of the way things could be, such as with The Stand by Stephen King. Books can show you the way things should be, whether it's a religious book such as the Bible or something like Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche or Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant.

On that same note, books can have a nasty effect, such as Rage by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman, which was found in the backpack of a student after a school shooting, or The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell, arguably one of the most controversial books of all time.

For me, books have always been strong influence and I love them. Stories allow people to view things from a new perspective, one they may have never considered before. In my writings, that's what I strive to accomplish. PENs goals at free speech also help others gain a new perspective, such as I Couldn't Keep It To Myself by Wally Lamb, written by the women of the York Correctional Facility.

Books obviously don’t make anyone better, more deeply human, whatever that might mean, more capacious of empathy, intellect, intuition, psychological nuance; they don’t articulate emotional experience or frame concepts in ways that have made any discernible difference to the world—our whiffled clod of suffering and greed same as it ever was—except in one endlessly iterated particular case called, in various languages by various individuals, my own.

There is one work, and one body of work, that I’d sell my soul to have written myself (should there be any willing buyer). The first is that sublimely philosophical drama, The Importance of Being Earnest. The second is everything from the societally antic pen of W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert & Sullivan. (With, I might as well add, this anti-surgical caveat: I’d very much prefer not to have to undergo transsexuality in order to effect this wholly metaphysical desire.)

I wish Jane Bowles had written a second novel. I wish she had been able to do it. It would have been, because I want to know more about him, about her father, whom she adored and who died when she was twelve, and also Cherifa, her Moroccan lover, about whom there were many terrible rumors, the worst that she poisoned Jane. Set in Tangier, where Jane lived as an adult, and Woodmere, Long Island, where she lived as a child, the novel might have Miss Goering, from Two Serious Ladies, return in both places as the great aunt of Bowles’s father. Maybe Miss Goering would tell the family story, and Bowles’s father would interrupt with his side of it. Odd characters from Bowles’s actual and imagined life would come and go—Aaron Copland, Moroccan dignitaries, itinerant Americans wanting to get high with Paul Bowles, her husband. Paul Bowles would have many conversations with Cherifa, while they were stoned, about Jane, her philosophy, writing, and her adventures. Jane Bowles’s real-life former lovers would wander in and out of the narrative, complaining comically; and the desert would draw them all to it in bizarre imaginary scenes only Jane Bowles could have written. Her imagination was sui generis. Jane herself would enter the narrative, to debunk whatever the other characters said about her. Her conversations with her father would reveal her as a child, her sad childhood. The novel would be alarmingly funny, poignant but anti-sentimental, and shockingly sharp-witted. Jane Bowles would have written her demons and trounced them brilliantly and lived to a very old age, knowing her name.

1. If I could imagine it, I could write it.

I wish I had written Lolita, or at least “Spring in Fialta.” A few of Chekhov’s stories too.

2. Literature—books—provide access to the areas of human knowledge that are not available otherwise. Therefore I am interested exclusively in the things that literature alone can do.

I believe along with Proust that other people are the show cases of our own minds. Books open doors to possibilities in the underground rivers that flow through our own mind reminding us that the imagination reigns supreme if we know how to swim with the current

It was because of Julio Cortázar that I came to read Ayer Ya Es Maňana (Yesterday Is Already Tomorrow) by the great Argentine translator and author Eduardo Vladimiroff. “He’s like a socialist Borges,” Cortázar said to me one evening in Paris, passing me the book. “You’ll like him.” Like him? I loved it, felt, as I read, that Vladimiroff was mocking me, telling me that his words were more deeply mine than anything I’d written yesterday, anything I’d write tomorrow. It is set in a Latin American country whose dictator believes he can save his land by keeping its capital perpetually underdeveloped, exactly as it used to be fifty years ago, with the hope that nostalgic tourists will immerse themselves in the past as if it were an amusement park. In a city that grows more phantasmagoric with each page, each lost character, each twist and turn of the duplicitous novelist’s rabid imagination, we follow the story of Solando, a fireman who is being stalked by a pyromaniac. Thirty years after Cortázar’s recommendation, now that yesterday already is tomorrow, I can safely venture that this is the one novel I am sorry not to have written, I am sad that, hélas, I am not Eduardo Vladimiroff.

My book would be WAR & PEACE, with WAR & crossed out. I sink into books about wars and other forms of human strife to escape the real world human strife (also known as turning off the BBC or PBS news on the hour). Three books that remain with me long after I read them: Marguerite Duras' MODERATO CANTABILE, Jan Wiese's THE NAKED MADONNA (Norwegian) & Evan S. Connell's DIARY OF A RAPIST. Where the imagination overpowers you but remains forever in the realm of fiction. Fiction, now there's a concept. Only a lack of imagination requires "reality" TV.

I want to read a book that opens a window in my bedroom, leads me across the dark fields into the forest and underground, where there are stone stairs to the center of the earth and a huge, green marble cavern where the fictional characters I’ve most loved—Marcel, Ozma, Lolita, Emma, Cosimo, Claudine, Mr Biswas, Peter Pan—come in and out, intent on mysterious business but there for a moment for me to inhabit, returning to me those afternoons and nights of reading, who I was as a child and young woman; a book that then engages me in a vigorous washing by something like a big cat’s tongue—pages lashing—and quietly deposits me in my chair at my desk, computer screen blank and humming.

Recently, I was re-reading Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald, and was reminded of how a book, as a physical object, can make a reader’s involvement with an author’s work even more intimate and personal. I’ve read all of Fitzgerald’s novels more than once and with each reading I find new things to admire and learn from—descriptions, dialogue, images, her way of depicting multiple levels of narration within a small space. Whenever I find something in her books that I appreciate, I’ve gotten into the habit of folding down the corner of the page—the top corner if the example is on the top half of the page, and the bottom corner if it’s at the bottom half. (In cases where both sides of the page’s upper or lower halves having stellar writing, I double-fold the corners.) Because I’d read the book before, there were already many turned-down corners; and as I re-read, I found myself folding and double-folding more and more, until the book became origami—each crease signifying something new and celebratory and specific, creating a three-dimensional portrait of my reading experience. Maybe it’s because of the intangibility of new media in publishing today—Kindles and iPhones and other digital readers—that the experience of re-reading this book felt so significant. But there was something disarming about how the physical components of the book seemed to welcome my participation and somehow manifest that elusive mutual transference between a book and its reader: the silent acts of speaking and being addressed, listening and being heard, the feelings of being captured, remembered, and returned to, time and time again.

In the paper the other day I read a report about kids and the ways they use games to imaginatively make sense of the real world. But that is no less true of adults. If we didn’t immerse ourselves in books, how would we ever know who we are? I was a teenager when I discovered that if I could string together words describing the ordinary things around me, I was suddenly able to turn myself into a person who had a map of the world. In a way I was still a child and words were like crumbs I had dropped on the floor of the forest in the hope that next morning they’d help me get back home. It couldn’t always work, of course, but, it was only words that helped me describe my darkness and my loss.

I’d like to have written books that end up with pages turned down and underlinings, musings in the margin and not Who is this? A book with a concordance (I like the trumpet sound of that). A book with a bird as a hero, not a bit part in Noah’s Ark. Books titled: Six Men Shopping, Women Who Weep Needlessly, Pets Aren’t Us, Underwater Sex, Recycling Bras, Bite the Hand That Needs You, Bituminous Bitches. Speculation always ends in alliteration.

My most powerful book was Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley. In Sudan I paid our dugout paddler in pages of the paperback. He then rolled his smokes in them, rested, and proceeded to pole us further up the crocodile-infested Nile. It was about a forty-five-page trip altogether and nip-and-tuck getting each page read before he needed it.