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 [...]

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 [...]

This piece by geoff on Metaxu Cafe, reports on the PEN World Voices Festival: The Secret Lives of Cities panel, which brought together authors whose work has focussed on a particular city: Juan de Recacoechea on La Paz, Yousef Al-Mohaimeed on Riyadh, Francisco Goldman on Guatemala City, and Joshua Furst on Minneapolis.
One of Goldman’s riffs [...]

The Guardian reports on the honourable dealings of the much loved supermarket chain:
Writers criticise Tesco for ‘chilling’ Thai libel actions
· Leading authors sign letter to retailer’s chief executive
· Supermarket chain urged to uphold human rights
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Jacob Russell looks at beginnings:
I wanted to begin with opening paragraphs rather than sentences, precisely to get past the “hook” –the [...]