John Baker’s Blog

This from PEN World Voices: Rushdie, Eco, and Vargas Llosa by Dorothy W. at Metaxu Cafe:
Then Lopate asked a couple questions solicited on index cards from the audience; the first question, asking the writers to describe their writing methods, got only boos from the audience because of its banality, and I was delighted to see [...]

Mario Balzic is the Police Chief of Rocksburg, a town in Pennsylvania where the mills have closed and the mines shut down. In this 1974 novel, as in other novels in the series, the Chief lives with his wife Ruth, their two daughters, and Balzic’s elderly mother.
It had taken years for the hedges to [...]

American poet, Gary Snyder was recently awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize - a $100,000 lifetime achievement award.
This is one of his poems:
For a Stone Girl at Sanchi
half asleep on the cold grass
night rain flicking the maples
under a black bowl upside-down
on a flat land
[...]

Marlon James at the PEN American Center writes about the Mean Streets panel at New York’s World Voices Festival, with Jo Nesbo (Norway), Roberto Saviano (Italy), Christian Jungersen (Denmark) and Juan Gabriel Vasquez (Colombia).
Funnily enough it was Saviano, the only writer dealing explicitly with non-fiction, who reminded us that the very notion of the hero [...]