World Books
By Bill Marx Hu Jia, a freelance writer, civil rights, environmental and AIDS activist, was arrested in 2007 on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power.” Last week the PEN American Center announced it was sending out letters to the Bush Administration and Congressional leaders protesting, fifty days before the start of the Olympics, the…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx and Wen Huang Dissident Chinese writer Liao Yiwu lives near the epicenter of the earthquake in Sichuan province. His home is about 17 miles from the school where hundreds of students were trapped. Miraculously, his building survived, though there are several giant cracks in the concrete stairway. In his immediate area more…
Read Moreby Bill Marx A quiet but insistent source of frustration among some of the authors at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York turned out to be the amount of attention garnered by China and its brutal treatment of writers. All agreed that PEN’s petition to free imprisoned dissenting authors in the country was…
Read Moreby Bill Marx Who would have guessed that a writer who proudly earned the reputation as the Oscar the Grouch of contemporary literature would have so many loving fans? But there were few empty seats two nights ago at New York’s Austrian Cultural Forum, which hosted a PEN panel, proudly entitled “The Art of Failure,”…
Read Moreby Bill Marx I’m down in New York for PEN American’s annual Festival of International Literature, five days of readings, panels, and discussions on writing around the globe that emphasizes the plight of imperiled authors, particularly those that write in languages other than English. Chinese dissident writer Ma Jian
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Music Commentary: New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest versus French Quarter Fest