Jonathan Taylor writes:
On Tuesday I caught a panel discussion called “The Death of Boom Culture?” at the New York Public Library, that I think is worth watching or listening to online once it becomes available. It was a conversation that, precisely in the way the guests were talking past each other, was a fascinating gloss on its topic, or its occasion: this essay by Walter Benn Michaels in the January/February Bookforum. Benn suggests that over the last three decades of rising inequality, literary fiction and other arts have predominantly flattered the prevailing world-view of the economically ascendant, embroidering on safe historical topics (Toni Morrison stood in for this phenomenon) while obscuring the structures of contemporary injustice.
The animated exchanges with David Simon (of “The Wire”), Dale Peck and, especially, Susan Straight, demonstrated how everything Benn Michaels said could be totally right, as far as it went, yet be achingly incomplete. Between his dead-on assessment of the phantom “boom,” and the viewpoint of artists who affirm its devastating realities, there was an interesting obstacle to communication. When Simon or Straight referred to the specific experience they draw on in making art that does do for American society what Michaels wants it to do, he was quick to roll his eyes (he said at one point, “I’m rolling my eyes”) at what he saw as appeals to personal identity. Simon’s gestures to genre narrative, and an audience questioner’s reference to hip-hop culture, pointed to a less narrow view of actually consumed culture that could fit in with Benn Michaels’s polemic—if only he considered it.
That there was no ready set of common terms for talking unflinchingly about an unjust system that all the participants are a part of, is something of a fulfillment of Benn’s critique. But I left more interested in cracking a book of Straight’s to read about “the actual structure of American society.”

Jonathan Taylor writes:
For the second year, I’m extremely honored to be hosting a PEN World Voices Festival event for the Austrian Cultural Forum April 30, this year on Franz Kafka and his newly retranslated novel Amerika: The Missing Person. But I’m excited about a lot of other events in this year’s festival, which runs from April 27 to May 3 and is, as usual, a major gathering of international writing genius. Below is the festival press release highlighting many of the events, preceded by a few picks of my own from the lineup (see the site for the full schedule and ticket and reservation details, which vary—many events are free):

• The pairing of Mark Kurlansky (Cod, Salt, The Basque History of the World) and Raja Shehadeh (Palestinian Walks) to address “how human constructs—industry, war—have marked our surroundings” (April 30) is inspired.
• I became acquainted with Horacio Castellanos Moya at my Thomas Bernhard event at last year’s festival. He’s as ensorcelling a talker as he is a writer, and an appropriately wily member of the panel titled “Where Truth Lies: A Conversation on the Art of Fiction,” May 2. It is “the first in a series of launch events for the new Center for Fiction in New York City (formerly the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction).”
• To the other side of the coin: “Is Nonfiction Literature?” I say yes—look how many of the events I’m picking are about nonfiction. This May 3 event relates tangentially to a hobbyhorse of mine. The activists promoting literature in translation in the U.S. are valiant and have a sufficiently arduous task just with regard to fictive “literature,” but it strikes me that there’s little talk of how much we’re also missing out on a world of knowledge, thought and expression conducted in other languages’ nonfiction.
• I know a lot of people whose eyes were permanently opened to the New York City history around them by Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World (haven’t read it, but feel like I’ve absorbed a lot via public radio interview osmosis). And the books of Dutch journalist Geert Mak have continually renewed my awareness of the visible marks of change and continuity etched the landscape of Europe, particularly his Jorwerd: The Death of the Village in Late Twentieth-Century Europe. I am definitely not missing their May 3 event with Ian Buruma, “Henry Hudson at 400: Amsterdam and New York City.”

Here’s the PEN press release with more highlights:
The Fifth Annual
PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL
OF INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE
Evolution/Revolution
APRIL 27 to MAY 3, 2009
160 Writers from 40 countries in over 60 events
Laurie Anderson, Paul Auster, Muriel Barbery, Mark Z. Danielewski, Edwidge Danticat, Richard Ford, Neil Gaiman, Philip Gourevitch, David Grossman, Paul Krugman, Nam Le, Rick Moody, Walter Mosley, Péter Nádas, Michael Ondaatje, Richard North Patterson, Lou Reed, Salman Rushdie, Nawal El Saadawi, Hwang Sok-yong, George Soros, Colm Tóibín, Adrian Tomine among this year’s participants.
www.pen.org/worldvoices
New York City, March 25, 2009 – Salman Rushdie and The PEN American Center today announce the program for the Fifth Annual World PEN Voices Festival of International Literature taking place this year Monday, April 27th through Sunday, May 3rd.
Salman Rushdie says, “I’m hugely proud to Chair this celebration of international literature, now in its fifth year and flourishing despite tough times in publishing and beyond. When it seems everything else is shutting down and closing up shop, the writers, editors, poets and playwrights of PEN are opening their arms again to welcome their colleagues from around the globe to New York City. We cannot begin to understand and appreciate the world if we do not read its literature and now, more than ever, PEN’s role in providing a platform for global literary discussion is vital.”
John Makinson, Chairman and CEO, Penguin Group, comments, “The breathtaking scope of the 2009 World Voices Festival is a defiant response to economic adversity, and so it should be. Freedom of expression is an absolute value and all of us – writers and readers, publishers and retailers – need to give it our vocal support in any climate. Penguin and PEN are natural partners. We share a global outlook, common values and a determination to showcase the world’s greatest writing. We are delighted, and honored, to be the premier sponsor of this year’s festival.”
Bringing together 160 established and emerging writers from 40 countries for conversations, panels, readings, and performances for one week in New York City, The PEN World Voices Festival is a truly international literary cultural exchange. Evolution/Revolution is this year’s Festival theme with events that consider how the world changes and how we change. 2009 is a year to mark significant anniversaries – from Galileo’s telescope (1609) to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), from the Cuban Revolution (1959) to the collapse of Communism across Eastern Europe (1989) and Tiananmen Square (1989) – and in this year’s Festival, writers from every hemisphere will consider the many meanings of change, in science and religion, art and politics, language, music and, of course, literature.
2009 Festival Highlights include:
• Evolution/Revolution Opening Night with internationally acclaimed writers reading in their original languages as their words are projected on screens behind them in English with Muriel Barbery (France), Narcís Comadira (Spain/Catalonia), Jose Dalisay (Philippines), Edwidge Danticat (US/Haiti), Péter Nádas (Hungary), Sergio Ramírez (Nicaragua), Salman Rushdie (India/US), and Raja Shehadeh (Palestine).
• Economic Crisis and How to Deal With It with the world’s leading economic minds including Paul Krugman, George Soros, Senator Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Nouriel Roubini, and Robin Wells.
• The Fourth Annual Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture by Egyptian writer, activist, and one of the leading cultural and political voices of our times, Nawal El Saadawi. Previous lectures have been delivered by Orhan Pamuk, David Grossman and Umberto Eco.
• Conversations between some of the most intriguing and creative writers at work today: Muriel Barbery and Adam Gopnik; Mark Z. Danielewski and Rick Moody; Enrique Vila-Matas and Paul Auster; David Grossman and Leonard Lopate; Péter Nádas and Daniel Mendelsohn; and Richard Ford and Nam Le.
• The enormously popular PEN Cabaret, promising to be epic, with performances by music legends and cultural icons Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, readings by Walter Mosley, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Nick Laird, an adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s New York piece from State by State featuring Parker Posey, James Franco, Peter Hirsch, Carrie Brownstein, and Sean Wilsey…and more!
• Three back-to-back sessions with the most innovative and cutting-edge graphic artists on the planet including Neil Gaiman, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Adrian Tomine, Shaun Tan, David Polonsky, and Emmanuel Guibert (attend all 3 events for $25!)
• A celebration of the 20th anniversary of the original Pan-European Picnic when Austria and Hungary symbolically opened their border for a few hours and hundreds of East Germans flooded into Austria while guards stood idly by and history was made. This extraordinary open-air event at DUMBO’s Empire Fulton Ferry Park will feature the three essentials: music, food, and literature.
• Celebrations of the lives and work of playwright Harold Pinter, Sudanese author Tayeb Salih, Cuba’s Reinaldo Arenas and the Mallorcan poet Blai Bonet.
• Defiance: The Spirit of ’89 is an evening to celebrate the power of one person standing against tyranny — as iconically demonstrated by one unidentified man facing down a column of tanks at Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989 — with Eszter Babarczy, Jose Dalisay, Nick Flynn, Sergio Ramírez, Hwang Sok-yong, János Térey, and Paul Verhaeghen.
• A night of unabashed, old-fashioned storytelling from The Moth with Salwa Al Neimi, Jonathan Ames, Petina Gappah, László Garaczi, and Salman Rushdie.
• A star-studded Around the Globe adventure at the 92nd St Y featuring Bernardo Atxaga (Spain), Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe), Mariken Jongman (Netherlands), Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka/Canada), Daniel Sada (Mexico), Hwang Sok-yong (Korea), Antonio Tabucchi (Italy), and Colm Tóibín (Ireland).
• Jazz: The Revolution of Beat — Four American writers, including legendary jazz critic Gary Giddins and American poet Bill Zavatsky, explore the birth and life of jazz and how it relates to the written word, with musical accompaniment by the Diane Moser Quintet.
• Henry Hudson at 400 Years: Amsterdam and New York City with Dutch authors Ian Buruma and Geert Mak joining US novelist Russell Shorto to celebrate and discuss the Dutch Influence on America and New York and vice versa.
PEN American Center is the largest of the 141 centers of International PEN, the world’s oldest human rights organization and the oldest international literary organization. International PEN was founded in 1921 to dispel national, ethnic, and racial hatreds and to promote understanding among all countries. PEN American Center, founded a year later, works to advance literature, to defend free expression, and to foster international literary fellowship. The fifth annual World Voices Festival for International Literature is chaired by Salman Rushdie and directed by Caro Llewellyn.
The PEN World Voices Festival is made possible by the generous support of many co-sponsors, partner organizations, cultural agencies, and individual donors. The Premier Sponsor for this year’s Festival is The Penguin Group, and Sponsors are Bloomberg, Borders, The Kaplen Foundation, LJK Literary Management, National Endowment for the Arts, Random House, Rodale and The Roger Smith Hotel.
Internationally acclaimed writer Michael Ondaatje, participating this year in his third World Voices Festival, considers the event “a great celebration as well as an essential discovery of writers around the world.” Join him and 159 other remarkable participants in New York City at the 2009 PEN World Voices Festival, April 27 – May 3.
For a full schedule of Festival events and a complete list of participating authors,
please go to www.pen.org/worldvoices

Jonathan Taylor writes:
The Festival of New French Writing, February 26-28 at NYU, is like a miniature, Gallic (and free) New Yorker Festival, with folks like fiction editor Deborah Triesman, art director Françoise Mouly, Mark Danner, and Adam Gopnik among the Americans in discussions with an assiette of French writers. Infos pratiques below the fold:
Schedule
All events will be held in:
Vanderbilt Hall
40 Washington Square South at the corner of Macdougal Street
Simultaneous interpretation available — all events are free
Schedule Thursday
7:00 Opening
7:30 Olivier Rolin, E.L. Doctorow. Moderated by Sam Tanenhaus.
8:45 Marie NDiaye, Francine Duplessix Gray. Moderated by Lila Azam Zanganeh.
Schedule Friday
2:00 Marie Darrieussecq, Adam Gopnik. Moderated by Deborah Treisman.
3:15 Abdourahman Waberi, Philip Gourevitch. Moderated by Lila Azam Zanganeh.
4:30 Bernard-Henri Lévy, Mark Danner. Moderated by Caroline Weber.
7:00 Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Siri Hustvedt. Moderated by Olivier Barrot.
8:15 Marjane Satrapi, Chris Ware. Moderated by Françoise Mouly.
Schedule Saturday
2:00 Emmanuel Carrère, Francine Prose. Moderated by Caroline Weber.
3:15 David Foenkinos, Stefan Merrill Block. Moderated by Violaine Huisman.
4:30 Frédéric Beigbeder, Paul Berman. Moderated by Tom Bishop.
5:45 Chantal Thomas, Edmund White.

Jonathan Taylor writes:
Lore Segal, whose Other People’s Houses was serialized by The New Yorker in the 1960s, and whose Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2007) also grew out of a series of related New Yorker stories, will be among five writers of Austrian Jewish origin reading this Thursday from “memoirs and fiction on growing up and older away from their homeland,” at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York. Their website is a bit problematic, so I’ll paste the info below the fold:
THURSDAY FEB 5, 6:30 PM
HOW FAR WAS VIENNA?
Five accomplished authors with Austrian-Jewish roots will read from newly published memoirs and fiction on growing up and older away from their homeland. The participants will also discuss the different experiences of those who settled outside the metropolis and in New York, and nostalgia and memory among refugees, compared to immigrants.
With authors Carol Asher, Eva Kollisch, Bruno Schwebel, Lore Segal and Leo Spitzer.
Carol Ascher’s new memoir, “Afterimages”, as well as her novel, “The Flood”, describe her childhood in a community of refugee pyschoanalysts in Topeka, Kansas. She is also an anthropologist who studies equity issues in public schools. Her essays and stories have been published widely, and she is the recipient of numerous literary awards.
Eva Kollisch’s most recent book, “The Ground Under My Feet”, describes her youth in Baden, amidst growing Nazism and her escape on the Kindertransport. She is also the author of “Girl in Movement”, a memoir of her early years in the United States. She taught German, Comparative Literature, and Women’s Studies at Sarah Lawrence College for over 30 years and is professor emerita.
Bruno Schwebel fled from Vienna to Paris with his family in 1938 at the age of ten. After sojourns in Lisbon and Casablanca, Schwebel came to Mexico City, where he serverd, among other things, as technical director of Mexico’s largest TV network. In 1976 he began publishing stories in Spanish and then in German translations. His book “As Luck would have It: My Exile in France and Mexico. Recollections and Stories” was published by Ariadne Press.
Lore Segal’s new collection, “Shakespeare’s Kitchen”, evokes the comic melancholy of the outsider. Two previous books, “Other People’s Houses” and “Her First American”, describe her life in England after escaping on the Kindertransport, the experiences of a young refugee in America. She is the recipient of several literary awards and has contributed to The New Yorker, among other publications.
Leo Spitzer, who was born in a refugee community in La Paz, is the author of “Hotel Bolivia”, “Lives In Between: Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil and West Africa”, among others. He is Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History at Dartmouth College, and has taught at Columbia University. he is the recipient of a number of fellowships and awards in social history.
VENUE
Austrian Cultural Forum NY, 11 East 52nd Street, New York, NY 10022
RESERVATIONS
Free Admission. Reservations necessary. Call (212) 319 5300 ext. 222 or e-mail reservations@acfny.org

Here’s a press release we can believe in: what promises to be a scintillating and hilarious conversation with some of the creators of Emily’s favorite show, Avenue Q, and the acclaimed and wittily titled [Title of Show]. Here are the details:

**P.S. 107 Continues 5th Annual “Readings on the 4th Floor” Series With Focus on “Broadway Unbound”: The creators of Avenue Q and Title of Show along with the artistic director of the Vineyard Theatre talk about redefining the Broadway musical**

Brooklyn, January 26, 2009 – How do you convince a producer that a show featuring puppets for an adult audience and one about writing a Broadway musical will ever succeed in a theater world focused on risk aversion? On **Wednesday, February 25 at 7:30 p.m. on the 4th Floor of PS 107 in Park Slope, Brooklyn**, **Framji Minwalla**, visiting professor of drama at Fordham University, will moderate a panel that includes some of the most successful off-off Broadway talents to ever make it to The Great White Way.

**Jeff Bowen** and **Hunter Bell**, creators and stars in the Obie-award winning musical Title of Show, will be joined by their female lead, **Susan Blackwell**. **Jeff Whitty**, Tony Award-winning playwright (Best Musical 2004) of Avenue Q and Tales of the City will be joined by **Bobby Lopez**, Tony-award winning composer and lyricist for Avenue Q. **Doug Aibel**, artistic director of the Vineyard Theater, which took both of these shows to Broadway, will round out the panel. Anecdotes, spontaneous song and the trials and tribulations of creating musical theater that goes beyond the norm will be center stage in this evening of theatrical insight.

Broadway Unbound will be held on the 4th Floor of PS 107, which is located at 13th Street and 8th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Tickets are $15 online at www.ps107.org or at the door.

This esteemed topical literary series continues to raise funds for the newly renovated fourth floor library/art/performance space of P.S. 107. It has featured everyone from Pulitzer prize-winning author Jumpha Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies, to leading journalists including George Packer of The New Yorker.

Martin Schneider writes:
Just a quick note to alert our readers that David Denby will be reading from his new book Snark tonight at the Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side (82nd and Broadway) at 7pm. I hope I can attend (not sure yet).
If you’ll be there, or even if you won’t, you can get in the mood with this meaty interview with the Columbia Journalism Review.

Martin Schneider writes:
Check this out—I am really excited about an exhibition that starts at the J.P. Morgan Library in New York this Friday. It’s called “On the Money: Cartoons for The New Yorker” and it runs from January 23 through May 24. In the wake of the disastrous financial news of the last few months, someone had the brilliant idea of using New Yorker cartoons to illustrate attitudes about finance over the last several decades:

Celebrating the art of the cartoonist, “On the Money: Cartoons for The New Yorker” features approximately eighty original drawings by some of The New Yorker’s most talented and beloved artists who have tackled the theme of money and the many ways in which it defines us. Included in the show are drawings by such luminaries as Charles Barsotti, George Booth, Dana Fradon, Lee Lorenz, William Hamilton, and J. B. Handelsman. The exhibition is on view only at the Morgan.
The works are drawn entirely from the collection of Melvin R. Seiden, a longtime supporter of the Morgan, who has assembled one of the largest and most representative private selections of this art form which spans the history of The New Yorker. The Seiden collection of New Yorker cartoons, numbering nearly 1,500 sheets, complements the Morgan’s holdings in the history of satire and humor, which range from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Following the great cartoonists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—including James Gillray, H.K. Browne a.k.a. Phiz, and Honoré Daumier, in whose works the Morgan’s collection is particularly rich—the artists represented in this exhibition continue the thread of chronicling contemporary attitudes.
…
The drawings in “On the Money” include a selection of works from the magazine’s early years as well as contributions from cartoonists working during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, when financial issues were among the dominant themes of many cartoons. Subjects such as politics, sex, inheritance, and real estate demonstrate the impact of money on individual lives, while the shared experience of recessions and booms provides inspiration for broader treatments of the theme. Finding humor in money and the economy has been a mainstay of New Yorker artists, and the cartoons continue to engage viewers.
The artistry of the works reveals the eloquent and efficient draftsmanship essential to a successful cartoon as well as the artists’ process of creating and revising an incisive, humorous vignette. The exhibition also delineates the critical role of the cartoon editor, whose work is essential to the reader’s enjoyment. A selection of cartoons that were improved by editorial recommendations is accompanied by equally amusing correspondence between editor and artist about achieving the perfect union between word and image. Also featured in the exhibition are photographic portraits by Anne Hall of many of the artists behind the cartoons.

The sample picture on the exhibition page (note the handwritten caption) is mouth-watering. I am so going to this!