PEN America
Fiction, poetry, conversation, criticism & memoir
pen.org/pen-america-journal
PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers publishes fiction, poetry, conversation, criticism, and memoir. It 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.
Past contributors include Paul Auster, Michael Cunningham, Nikki Giovanni, Marilynne Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag, John Edgar Wideman, and many others.
Available issues (click to explore):
Pages (PDF): 209
Publisher: PEN America
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IN THIS ISSUE
PEN Voices celebrates the work done at PEN American Center in the past year, promoting literature and defending freedom of expression nationally and internationally. With events from the World Voices Festival, selections from Literary Award winners, previews from PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant recipients, work from the Prison Writing Program, and adapted favorites from PEN.org, this issue brings together fiction, essay, poetry, art, and conversation from all parts of the PEN world. Featuring work from Earl Lovelace, Jamaica Kincaid, André Aciman, Gina Apostol, Sherman Alexie, Eileen Myles, Sergio De La Pava, Orhan Pamuk, Simon Critchley, Liu Xia, and many more.
Pages (PDF): 220
Publisher: PEN America
Purchase includes: EPUB & PDF
IN THIS ISSUE
Teachers goes back to school with a global roster of writers and artists as they explore their literary and sentimental educations. Featuring Eileen Myles, Martha Cooley, Kimiko Hahn, Ron Padgett, Theresa Rebeck, Elissa Schappell, Paul La Farge, Dorothy Allison, and a look at PEN's diverse programming. At the end of the issue we transport you back to 1922, PEN American Center's founding year and the height of modernism. Borrowing from the pages of The Dial, The Crisis, and The Little Review, we offer you a taste of the literary scene, alongside a trove of photographs, drawings, advertisements, headlines, and commentary. The featured writers—including Joyce, Du Bois, Woolf, McKay, Crane, Cather, Fitzgerald, Mansfield, and Moore—remain some of our greatest teachers and literary loves.
Pages (PDF): 204
Publisher: PEN America
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IN THIS ISSUE
In Maps, we wanted to explore how writers encounter and examine the fictional topographies of their lives. Forrest Gander, Billy Collins, and Susan Bernofsky, among many others contributed original pieces to our forum. Also featured in this issue are conversations with Amélie Nothomb, Dale Peck, Abdellah Taïa, and Buket Uzuner. Plus poetry, fiction, essays, drama, and graphic narratives from around the world.
Pages (PDF): 236
Publisher: PEN America
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IN THIS ISSUE
In The Good Books, over 50 writers—including Yiyun Li, Anne Fadiman, Karen Russell, Gary Shteyngart, David Shields, and many more—choose the works in translation they’d bring to a great global book swap. Also featured: talks and conversation by Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, and other participants in the 1986 PEN Congress. Plus fiction, poetry, essays, and comics from around the world.
Pages (PDF): 228
Publisher: PEN America
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IN THIS ISSUE
Who is dear to you? Lovers features short fiction by Don DeLillo, new poetry by John Ashbery and Marilyn Hacker, a conversation between Patti Smith and Jonathan Lethem, and much more—including a forum on literary love with John Barth, Jessica Hagedorn, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lily Tuck, and many others.
Pages (PDF): 210
Publisher: PEN America
Purchase includes: EPUB & PDF
IN THIS ISSUE
Correspondences presents e-mail exchanges, letters, telegrams, epistolary fiction, and more. Sam Lipsyte writes to Barry Hannah, Siri Hustvedt writes to Scheherazade, and Paul LaFarge writes to Marcel Proust. Anne Carson searches letters from a lost brother and Robert Walser writes behind the walls of a sanitarium. Plus comics from Iran and Lebanon; fiction by Alain Mabanckou and Donald Ray Pollock; poetry by Billy Collins; and much, much more.