The transformations in this issue of PEN America are linguistic, temporal, spatial, physical, cultural, political: In stories by William Kennedy, Mary Morris, and Marie Darrieussecq, bodies mutate into different bodies - the sort of metamorphoses Apuleius and Ovid favored. Mavis Gallant, George Saunders, and Ben Okri describe transpositions between lives and afterlives. Yusef Komunyakaa, Angela Carter, Michael Joyce, and Harlan Ellison transport classic tales through time and space. Steven Millhauser and Matthea Harvey playfully modify genres. Essays adapted from a PEN tribute to Gabriel Garcia Marquez call attention to his elegant transitions from journalist to novelist, realist to romantic to maker of inexplicable magic. Yoko Tawada, Monique Truong, Edmund Keeley, and A.B. Yehoshua recount border crossings, many of them rough, from one language to another.
PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers is published by PEN American Center. Featuring fiction, poetry, conversation, criticism, and memoir, PEN America champions international authors and provides first-hand insight into the minds of contemporary writers through provocative symposia.
In 2000, PEN America was named one of the Ten Best New Magazines by Library Journal. PEN America has been a finalist for the Utne Independent Press Award for international coverage, and work from recent issues has been selected for Best American Essays, Best American Stories, and the Pushcart Prize.
-----
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. Its 3,400 distinguished members carry on the achievements in literature and the advancement of human rights of such past members as James Baldwin, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Arthur Miller, Marianne Moore, Eugene O'Neill, Susan Sontag, and John Steinbeck. To learn more about PEN American Center, please visit: www.pen.org. PEN American Center welcomes readers and writers from all walks of life to join us in our mission to protect free expression and celebrate literature. To learn how to become a Professional or Associate Member of PEN, please visit: pen.org/join.
