Anyway, I’ve been working all day (and all last night, and all tonight, and all day tomorrow) on a longer piece for Publishing Perspectives about the festival, and will post about that as soon as it runs. (Oh, and as soon as I’m done with that I can get back to “normal” Three Percent blogging, including running a few reviews—of Suzanne Jill Levine’s The Subversive Scribe, of Sofi Oksanen’s Purge.)

In the meantime, I just went through the and here are a few cool events that I’d recommend checking out:

I’m actually listening to this now . . . Heather Cleary Wolfgang (who is translating Sergio Chejfec for us) attended and said it was really interesting. Very interested to hear what Alberto Ruy-Sanchez has to say, seeing that he’s one of the most popular international authors I’m aware of (at least in terms of Facebook friends and Twitter followers).

Next up in my queue. I really wish I could’ve made it to this . . . Albert Mobilio moderated the conversation with Inga Kuznetsova, Jonathan Lethem, Eshkol Nevo, and Andrzej Stasiuk. (Particularly interested in hearing what Lethem and Stasiuk have to say. I had a chance to briefly meet Stasiuk at a special Polish party. He was there with his wife Monika, who runs one of the coolest presses in Poland . . .)

I actually did attend this one, and even wrote about it. It was an OK event, but the reason I mention it here is to stand up for all my fellow Midwesterners. In talking about Cercas’s accent, Vaill does what must be the most awful and inaccurate imitation of an Illinois accent ever recorded. Amanda, the Midwest is larger than Fargo. Just an FYI.

Hoping that the audio/video of Quim Monzo’s conversation with Robert Coover is posted at some point . . . But in the meantime, you can hear him on this panel, which was moderated by Edwin Frank and included Darryl Pinckney, Roxanna Robinson, and Colm Tóibín.

That’s the thing about PEN World Voices—cool stuff just keeps coming. And even if you’re attending one interesting panel, you can be assured that an equally interesting panel is going on halfway across the island. The festival is a surplus of intellectual, international activity.

The first afternoon panel I went to was a conversation between Javier Cercas and Amanda Vaill. Cercas’s books sound really interesting, but Vaill didn’t do a great job of setting these up, so for someone who hasn’t read The Speed of Light or Soldiers of Salamis it wasn’t all that meaningful. Nevertheless, I’m convinced that I need to read more Cercas. These books sound fascinating, especially the way he plays a bit of a game with truth and fiction, incorporating a lot of facts into his novels while making some shit up out of whole cloth, using a narrator named Javier who’s remarkably similar to Cercas himself, etc.

My favorite bit was when Vaill asked him how he became a writer. Paraphrasing here: “You know how you sometimes imitate people? Well, I was never good with the ladies, but I thought writers always got lots of women. So I wanted to be a writer. And by the time I found out that writers don’t actually get any women it was too late.” (This is true about publishing as well. Damn you, role models who made me believe that this would be a profession filled with hot dates. Damn you!)

I lest that event early though to catch the end of “The Essay,” a really wonderful discussion moderated by Susan Harris from Words Without Borders and featuring Quim Monzo, Peter Schneider, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint. The part of the discussion I saw revolved around truth and fiction (a la the Cercas event), especially in relation to essay writing and writing for newspapers.

Monzo is so naturally funny . . . I wish I could capture his style and share it with everyone. It’s weird, cause it’s not like he “tells jokes,” but every time he says something, everyone in the audience bursts out laughing. Anyway, he kept going on about how he “just writes” without concern for fact or fiction, genre or where the piece is being published. For example, in one of his more factual newspaper columns he talked about his two granddaughters who have Argentine names, etc. After the piece ran, a bunch of his friends said they were surprised to find out that he’s a grandfather. “Oh, I’m not a grandfather. But what about this piece? I just needed to invent them to make a point.”

This sort of fun and games didn’t seem to appeal much to Peter Schneider although his writing sort of falls into this space between fact and fiction . . . According to Sasa Stanisic, this is probably due to the fact that “creative nonfiction” really doesn’t exist in Germany. Which is unfortunate, but you know, sort of makes sense . . .

I saw Jean-Philippe Toussaint speak on two panels yesterday, and although I really like his earlier books—especially The Bathroom and Television—I’ve been sort of underwhelmed by his more recent stuff and by his presentations. That guy is so French. It’s odd—he makes these statements that are kind of over-the-top (“the opening sentence of my piece is just like Flaubert and my 16-page novel invokes four different literary genres: fiction, psychoanalysis, poetry, and literary criticism”) and coming from anyone else would seem ironic or self-aware. But I don’t think he means them in this way. Ah well, to each their own Frenchness.

And shit, to bring this full circle, I did see a few cute girls hanging around Jean-Philippe at the Hungarian party . . . Maybe there is something to this writer thing? But only if you’re French?

Granta editor and former NBCC president John Freeman opened up this event talking about how Best European Fiction 2010 served as a sort of print version of the PEN World Voices Festival. Containing something like 40 writers from across Europe, the anthology really is expansive in scope and represents a very ambitious missiomcn.

Colum McCann and Alexandar Hemon kicked off this two-part event discussion the infamous 3% statistic and the need for more translated literature. It’s interesting that both are transplants—Hemon from Bosnia, McCann from Ireland—who have achieved enormous success here in America, which, initially might seem to defy the belief that Americans are anti-international fiction. As McCann pointed out though, the American literary scene really isn’t insular at all—it tends to absorb foreign writers pretty easily. But as Hemon pointed out, it may be open to foreign writers, but it’s fairly insular when it comes to foreign languages.

Which is the great benefit of the Dalkey anthology/ongoing “Best European Fiction” project. Even though there are only 350 or so original works of translated fiction and poetry published in the U.S. every year, interested readers can now find out about at least a couple writers from Liechtenstein or Slovenia or wherever.

Following the McCann-Hemon conversation, valter hugo mae from Portugal, Naja Marie Aidt from Greenland/Denmark, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint from Belgium/France all read short pieces of their work to an incredibly enthusiastic crowd. (My estimation is that about 60 people were at Le Poisson Rouge for this event.)

valter hugo mae’s piece about a woman trying to poison her husband by putting a little cleaning solution in his nightly dinner struck a bit close to home. I was just telling someone yesterday about a time when I was convinced that my now ex-wife was poisoning me. I’m (pretty) sure she wasn’t, but still, thanks to this piece, I guess I can better understand the thrill she might have gotten from slipping a little something into my food?

Half-kidding, but honestly, the excerpt he read was really excellent, as were the bits by Naja Marie Aidt (I actually met her in Iceland last fall—she’s very charming and wonderful) and Jean-Philippe Toussaint.

After the readings, the conversation continued touching on issues of whether or not English was taking over the world, what authors from Portugal and Denmark need to be translated, what “Europe” and “European literature” actually mean.

It was an interesting conversation and overall event, that clearly laid out some of the issues that those of us working in international literature and publishing deal with on a regular basis. And the bits about America’s perceived literary insularity were particularly fascinating. Because I think they’re right—it’s not that the literary scene is anti-foreigners, it’s that the marketplace is anti-language. And although Hemon wanted to avoid the topic of who’s to “blame” for the dismal 3% statistic, it is a valid question to try and unpack, one which resurfaced when he asked the audience why they don’t read more literature in translation.

The audience really is the key to this whole question, especially now that any reader anywhere in America can order a copy of any published book. Today’s issue is about creating demand. And that’s one of the risks re: reporting on a festival like this. The crowd was electric, the writers all well-received—let’s just hope that this wasn’t a “preaching to the converted” sort of event. Or at least that these readers will go tell everyone they know how awesome the Liechtenstein literary scene is.

A number of years ago, when I was working for a different publishing house, Robert Coover suggested I take a look at the work of Catalan author Quim Monzo. I had someone do a reader’s report on 100 Stories, but the project sort of fizzled out despite the fact that the samples translated into English were brilliant and hilarious. Fast forward a few years, I’m now at Open Letter, have been to Barcelona (where I fell in love with the city and its culture, and where the people are always smiling and happy), met Quim Monzo, and signed on a bunch of his books, including the novel Gasoline, which we published a few weeks ago.

So I was naturally excited that the first PEN World Voices event I was able to attend was a one-on-one conversation between Quim Monzo and Robert Coover. The two writers have known and read each other for years, and interacted like old friends. (Apparently, they spent hours together before this event talking about everything under the sun, from masturbatory images to sex to how literature is better than life.)

Coover started off the conversation by talking about Quim’s work is so striking for being both incredibly serious (like in the Great Literature sense) and at the same time, so damn funny. Which is spot-on. Quim has the very, very rare talent to be able to infuse his sentences with a sort of charmed humor. It’s not like he writes jokes in the way that some writers jokes and punchlines, it’s different than that. Quim himself put it best in an interview he did some years ago in which he said: “In art, without humour—a subtle and invisible humour—there is nothing worth keeping.” A subtle and invisible humor. That’s it exactly.

As is basically mandatory, they talked a bit about influences, with Quim mentioning Julio Cortazar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Raymond Queneau, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Samuel Beckett.

Beckett was the perfect example of what both Coover and Monzo found so exhilarating about the possibilities of literature, and about how you can write funny. Coover cited the bit from Malone Dies in which the narrator is trapped in bed and tries to describe what he’s seeing out the window. After two or three lines he exclaims, “enough with this fucking scenery.”

Quim’s Beckett reference was to the part in Molloy where the narrator puts a number of pebbles in his different pockets then describes all the possibilities of moving these pebbles around. (This is a scene that’s always stuck in my mind, and is E.J. Van Lanen’s favorite Beckett bit as well. Weird.) And as Quim said, “after reading that and about all the possibilities of fiction, how can you go back to writing realistic romances about how Jane’s in love and now she’s sad.”

For all the subtly and grace in his writing, Monzo’s amazing with the one-liners and comedic bits. For example, when Quim was younger, his mother discouraged him from reading, saying that “reading so many novels will make you an idiot.” Which is pretty much what Quim tells his son in relation to watching too much TV . . . But both of these things are wrong. “TV is great. There’s a lot of shit on TV, but walk into a bookstore and there’s a lot of shit there too.”

In relation to critcs: “Like Cabrera Infante once said, there are two types of critics. The ones who like your books, who are the good critics. And the stupid critics who think your books are shit.”

The best bit came when Coover said something about how you really can’t write funny things about love. Quim was astounded—“of course you can!”—and went into an amazing rant about the “three words that refer to nothing: god, happiness, and love. Love is being horny in a tie.” Well played, Quim. Well played.

(And for the record, in addition to Gasoline, which is available now, Open Letter will be bringing out Guadalajara—a collection of Quim’s stories—next spring.)

• 
  (Scandinavia House, 58 Park Avenue, 1–2 p.m.)

I’m mostly interested in this event because it centers around Ernest Farres’s Edward Hopper, a collection of poems that was the focus of the first ever Reading the World podcast that Erica and I did with Larry Venuti.

• 
  (Austrian Cultural Forum, 11 East 52nd Street, 1–2:30 p.m.)

A couple weeks ago I actually joined the NBCC, so I have to push their events, right? Actually this panel sounds fascinating. It’s going to be a conversation among Eric Banks, Jane Ciabattari, Rigoberto González, and Mary Ann Newman about how the works by some of the authors at the festival have been received here and abroad, who their influences are, etc., etc. And one of the featured authors is our own Quim Monzo.

• 
  (Instituto Cervantes New York, 211–215 East 49th Street, 3–4:30 p.m.)

Totally in my wheelhouse of interest. Doesn’t even matter who’s participating—if I weren’t covering something else at that time, I’d totally be there. Also want to mention that Alberto Ruy-Sanchez—who is one of the speakers—has over 4,900 friends on Facebook. That’s unbelievable. I’m not sure I’ve even met 4,900 people in my entire life.

• 
  (Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, 3–4:30 p.m.)

Alberto Mobilio is moderating this, so it’s bound to be awesome. And Inga Kuznetsova, Jonathan Lethem, Eshkol Nevo, and Andrzej Stasiuk is a pretty solid lineup of authors . . . Not to mention, the subject of utopias and dystopias is always pretty interesting. Again, if I didn’t have a conflict, I’d try and make this one.

• 
  (Deutsches Haus at NYU, 42 Washington Mews, 3:30–4:30 p.m.)

This is where I’ll be during the other events I mentioned above. I’m really excited to see Quim and hear this conversation, and I’ll definitely be writing about this tomorrow. It was via Coover that I first found out about Quim back some years ago. Quim’s work is ofter compared to Coover’s, although recently Joanna Scott suggested that Peter Handke might be an even better point of reference. Regardless, this is bound to be an incredible event . . .

• 
  (Austrian Cultural Forum, 11 East 52nd Street, 7–8:30 p.m.)

I think everyone I know is going to this event. Which looks incredible. I get the sense this will be like the Walser event of a few years back, which was one of the most talked about and loved PEN World Voices panels ever. That one was a perfect introduction to the world of Robert Walser; I’m hoping this event brings Zweig the attention he deserves.

• 
  (Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, 8–9:30 p.m.)

I’ve never been to this, but from what I’ve heard, it’s usually a pretty packed and energetic event. Nice way to end the night . . .

I’m flying down early (like crack-of-dawn early) to write up a bunch of events for the PEN blog and for Three Percent. I’m also planning on interviewing Sofi Oksanen, Quim Monzo, and Mary Ann Newman for the Reading the World podcast series. And writing about the whole PEN World Voices experience for Publishing Perspectives. Oh, and attending as many parties as possible. (Not that I’ve actually been invited to any yet . . . Sigh.)

Anyway, here the Thursday events that I think sound most interesting:

• 
  (Baruch College Vertical Campus College, 55 Lexington Avenue at 25th Street, 2:30–4:30 p.m.)

Alexander Hemon’s probably the big draw for most people, but I’d be more interested in seeing Esther Allen moderate this. And Martin Solares, whose The Black Minutes looks very intriguing, is also participating along with Major Jackson, Yiyun Li, and Marcel Möring.

• 
  (Instituto Cervantes, 211–215 East 49th Street, 5:30–6:30 p.m.)

Susan Bernofsky is moderating this discussion with Michael Hofmann and Peter Stamm about the challenges in bringing Stamm’s work into English. Stamm was one (although not the primary one) of the inspirations behind this little bit of insanity that I wrote at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.

• 
  (Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, 7–8 p.m.)

I didn’t realize until I started putting this together, but all of my friends are moderating panels tomorrow . . . Anyway, this book sounds pretty interesting. Here’s a quote from a review in the Independent: “Homesick focuses on the relationship between student psychologist Amir and his student-photographer girlfriend Noa, but it moves fast to absorb the voices of their neighbours and covers several generations of Jews and Palestinians. Most striking is Nevo’s capacity to chart the delicate shifts in relationships and his skill in evoking longing for love, for a lost home, for parental attention and for renewal in stale marriage. He mixes his poignant observations of failing love with irony and occasional farce.”

• 
  (Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette Street, 7–8:30 p.m.)

I like readings in pubs. As a bonus, the lineup is pretty solid: Preston L. Allen, Javier Cercas, Siri Hustvedt, Karl O. Knausgaard, Anne Landsman, Thomas Pletzinger, Monique Proulx, Lee Stringer, Christos Tsiolkas, and Tommy Wieringa

• 
  (The Morgan Library & Museum, Gilder Lehrman Hall, 225 Madison Avenue, 7–8:30 p.m.)

Again with the awesome moderator . . . I can guarantee Edwin Frank will make this incredibly interesting. One of our authors—Quim Monzo, whose Gasoline is available now—is participating on this along with Darryl Pinckney, Colm Toibin, and Roxanna Robinson.

• 
  (Galapagos Art Space, DUMBO, 16 Main Street, 7–8:30 p.m.)

Huh, look at that, moderated by David Haglund. And starring John Freeman, Rodrigo Fresán, Rob Spillman, M Mark, and Peter Stamm. Man do I wish I was flying down tomorrow instead of Friday . . . Ah well. Anyway, this should be really interesting, seeing that some great lit mags are represented here, including Granta, Tin House and PEN America.

Hope everyone enjoys all these events . . . In addition to the pieces (or more likely “pieces,” since I think I’m going to be exhausted and not complete in my mind when I go to write up the events I’m attending) I’ll try and get some “reports from the field” to include later in the week(end).