Word: penned
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This year's congress, the first in New York in two decades, will draw some 700 PEN members from places as distant as South Korea and Argentina; among them will be three Nobel prizewinners and such luminaries as Günter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, Octavio Paz and Eugène Ionesco. The weeklong festivities will feature more than 30 panels on subjects as diverse as Translating Whitman, Alienation and the State, Science Fiction, and Censorship in the U.S.A. Total tab for the event, according to PEN: around...
Cost, in fact, was the major sticking point when the PEN American Center, of which Mailer is president, decided 13 months ago to be host of the congress. The center's annual budget is around $500,000. But Mailer had a fund-raising idea as inflated as the self-importance of Manhattan's literary circles: he would stage a series of eight literary evenings, with two writers entertaining each night, and charge $1,000 a subscription. "Even more than the Met!" cried one amused writer, referring to the price of a season ticket to the Metropolitan Opera. Says Mailer...
...series, called the PEN Celebrations, played first at the Booth and later at the Roy ale on Broadway, donated for the purpose by the Shubert Organization. Among the writers who appeared were Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, William Styron, John Updike, Woody Allen and Mailer himself, who agreed to debate sometime Archrival Gore Vidal. Indeed, the Vidal-Mailer matchup was a major draw for the series, and no wonder: their previous encounters have been dramatic, head-butting and drink-throwing affairs. But the latest showdown was disappointing. "A meeting between two toothless tigers," Mailer called...
BOOKS: In New York City, the 48th PEN Congress generates heat and light...
...January. The winter's coldest weather to date arrived with the delegates and guests. Central Park was a dismal filigree of naked branches; from hotel windows, the frozen ponds looked like the eyes of dead fish. And then there was the theme of the 48th annual congress of International PEN: "The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State." PEN, founded in 1921, is an organization of poets, playwrights, essayists, editors and novelists. Almost any of its 10,000 members worldwide, it would seem, could invent a more inviting topic for discussion. But none did, and initial expectations were...