Rose Moss Reads at Hotel Marlowe

Wednesday May 7, 2008
6:15 PM to 7:00 PM
During the Hotel Marlowe's Wine Hour, which begins at 5:00 PM

Rose Moss, born in Johannesburg, South Africa, has lived in the United States since 1964. In 2007, Penguin published her most recent book, In Court, as a Modern Classic. She has published two novels, The Family Reunion, short-listed for a National Book Award, and The Terrorist, featured selection by the New Fiction Society. The Terrorist was published as The Schoolmaster in South Africa and has been re-printed. Her third book, Shouting at the Crocodile, non-fiction, presents two defendants in a treason trial during the last days of apartheid. Among her more than forty short stories, one won a Quill Prize from the Massachusetts Review and another, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. Several have been cited in Best American Short Stories, been nominated for Pushcart prizes, selected for anthologies in the United States and abroad and have been widely translated. Her non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Atlantic Monthly and other similar publications and in scholarly journals. She teaches in the Nieman Program at Harvard University, Harvard Law School and the Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard. Moss is a member of PEN American Center, an active member of PEN New England, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Porter Square Books will be selling books at this reading.

The Hotel Marlowe is located at 25 Edwin H. Land Boulevard, Cambridge. Inexpensive parking is available in the Cambridgeside Galleria garage with direct entry into the hotel from Levels A and C. The hotel is closest to the Lechmere T-stop, and is within walking distance of Charles and Kendall Square.

For more information call 617-824-8820 or e-mail pen_ne@lesley.edu

"My First Time," a conversation with debut authors

Presented by Grub Street and PEN New England

Sunday, May 4, 2008, 6:30 p.m.
Borders Books
Back Bay (Boylston and Clarendon Streets)
Boston

CHRISTOPHER CASTELLANI (Moderator), Artistic Director & Executive Director, Grub Street
Castellani’s first novel, A Kiss from Maddalena, won the 2004 Massachusetts Book Award and has been published in five countries. His second novel, The Saint of Lost Things, was published in 2005. He has twice been a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and teaches fiction writing at Swarthmore College, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program. He is currently at work on his third novel.

Featuring...

D.Y. BECHARD, Vandal Love
Béchard's novel Vandal Love won two Commonwealth Writers' Prizes, one for the best first book in Canada and the second for the best first book in the British Commonwealth, and has been translated into both French and Arabic. He is a MacDowell fellow, and his stories, translations and essays have appeared in a number of magazines. He is finishing a new novel.

YAEL GOLDSTEIN LOVE, Overture
Goldstein Love graduated from Harvard with a degree in philosophy. Her first fiction publication was the short story "When Skeptics Die", which appeared in Commentary. Since then, her fiction and essays have appeared in a number of national and international magazines, journals, and anthologies. Goldstein Love was the 2005 National Jewish Book Award winner for Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, published in The Literary Review's 50th Anniversary Issue. Overture is her first novel.

MARGOT KAHN, Horses That Buck: The Story of Champion Bronc Rider Bill Smith
Kahn’s first book, Horses That Buck, has just been published. Her writing has appeared in Work Magazine, Ohioana Quarterly, and Publishers Weekly. Margot lives in Seattle, WA where she is the youth programs manager at Richard Hugo House and a writer-in-residence with the Seattle Arts and Lectures program Writers in the Schools.

KELLY McMASTERS, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir of an Atomic Town
McMasters lost it with Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir of an Atomic Town. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, Newsday, and Time Out NY. Kelly teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and is co-director of the KGB Nonfiction Reading Series in the East Village.

This event is open to the public…

PEN New England's Children's Book Caucus

10th Annual Discovery Evening

Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 6:30 PM
The Amphitheater
University Hall, Lesley University
(1815 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA)

2008 Susan P. Bloom Award Winner
Jame Richards for her YA novel-in-verse, Three Rivers Rising

Honorable Mentions
Colleen Ellis for her picture book, The Alphabet: Looking Beyond the Letter
Tamara Ellis Smith for her middle grade novel, A Marble Looks Like Home
Tracy Miller Geary for her middle grade novel, The Summer of My Movie Star

Reception to follow… Please come and celebrate all four talented writers who will read from their promising works.

(Open to the Public. Parking is available behind the building.)

THE AMERICAN BLANDSCAPE: Risky Writing and the Forces Keeping It Silent

Presented by PEN New England's Freedom-to-Write Committee and the Cambridge Forum

Thursday, April 10, 2008, 7:30 PM
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church
3 Church Street, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA

The panel, moderated by Richard Hoffman, Memoirist, Poet, and Fiction Writer will feature:

Linda McCarriston, Poet and National Book Award finalist,
Mark Pawlak, Poet and Editor of Hanging Loose Press
Jill Petty, Editor and Publisher

Most of us are familiar with the trends in publishing favoring a few big-name authors at the expense of the lesser known perhaps riskier writer: big publishers taking a Hollywood blockbuster approach to deciding what books to publish and market. Profit being the index of success, publishers no longer seem to feel an obligation, as Andre Chiffron has pointed out, to publish, even at a loss, a modicum of important, risky books each year. Many serious or unknown authors must look more and more to small presses to publish their work, but systemic distribution challenges make it hard for these books to reach a wide audience. The rock-star argument even exists in the academy: often authors with books published at smaller presses find it much harder to get tenure than those with books from the big publishers.

But is there something more insidious than the market at work? In her The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award), Frances Stonor Saunders details how after World War II the CIA penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, publishing and translating well-known authors who toed the Washington line, sponsoring abstract art to counter art with any social content, and subsidizing those journals that criticized revolutionary politics and defended or ignored violent and destructive U.S. policies at home and abroad.

The importance of politically challenging fiction and poetry throughout history is undeniable: from Turgenev’s powerful “A Sportsman’s Notebook,” which prompted Czar Alexander II to become the first world leader to free his country’s slaves, to the Lost Generation’s opposition to fascism, which led to U.S. involvement in the Great War; from Ginsburg’s “Howl” to Doris Lessing’s fiction to James Baldwin’s powerful and incisive essays. Has such writing been effectively denied its audience in our day? To what extent are the barriers to risky or oppositional writing real or imagined? What are the long-term societal and cultural dangers of a safe literature, of books as mere entertainment or escape? And what is the individual author, and the reader hungry for substance, to do?