Esteemed book review editor Teresa Weaver is being fired from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to help the newspaper cut costs, and John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, has called for an aggressive public protest. I think this is a great move, and if I were near Atlanta I’d love to join the flash mob that’s planning to assemble outside the newspaper’s main office on May 3.

Freeman has also asked numerous writers and critics to write articles for the NBCC’s Critical Mass …

After a week of PEN World Voices madness, I can’t do justice to this week’s New York Times Book Review. The cover article is on Edith Wharton, and there’s also a big piece on Michael Chabon in Arts and Leisure and a Lisa Carver endpaper in the Magazine. Dive in, if you want, and maybe I’ll catch up to all of this by Tuesday or so, or maybe never.

Saturday night at the Bowery Ballroom brings another sell-out PEN World Voices crowd, this time in a party mood. Nadine is in the house. Salman is in the house. Anne Waldman is in the house too, and slam poet Gary Mex Glazner is whooping it up somewhere in the back. We’re psyched for a rare appearance by playwright Sam Shepard, and we’re wondering if Sam and Salman and Nadine are Saul Williams and who-knows-else are going to join headliner Patti Smith …

Devoting my PEN World Voices Friday to modern African literature, I grab a seat at the Instituto Cervantes near the United Nations where Dedi Felman is moderating a panel of four diverse writers representing Algeria, Nigeria, Cote D’Ivorie and Zanzibar. There’s a good crowd of fifty or so eager listeners, and many of us feel confused when the panelists enter and a male writer occupies the seat behind the name plate for Yasmina Khadra. Introducing each writer, Dedi Felman explains that Khadra’s real …

Thursday at PEN World Voices brings me uptown to Columbia University, which I don’t visit often enough, to catch a variety of international writers associated with Words Without Borders or the new Words Without Borders anthology. There’s a nice turnout and a feeling of excitement in the room, because the combination of diverse talents and histories represented by the writers sitting patiently in the front row is truly something special.

After a quick Russian-doll-like unpacking of introductions (Esther Allen introduces Dedi Felman who …

PEN World Voices is a series of more than sixty encounters with writers from around the world, most of them taking place in small rooms before small audiences. But Wednesday night at Town Hall in Manhattan’s theater district is “the big show”, star-studded and sold-out, and host Salman Rushdie seems almost apologetic about this in his introductory remarks from the Town Hall stage.

Salman Rushdie played the host of last year’s event as well, and once again I find his MC’ing skills underwhelming. …

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post on my blog about metrical poetry, specifically, the line in Romeo and Juliet, “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” and how the scansion of the line could support the meaning of the words. (What can I say? It was a nice break from the usual posting about truly important things like underwear and cramps.) I don’t claim to be an expert on this subject by any stretch of the imagination, even …

In anticipation of the shock wave of PEN World Voices coverage that’s heading your way fast, today’s LitKicks post will not be about literature. Today I’d just like to talk about three random things that it occurs to me to be angry about today.

1. Here are the most useless three sentences in the world:

“At the tone, please leave your message. When you finish you may hang up, or press one for more options. To leave a callback number, press five.”

For God’s …

I’ve just seen T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock performed before my eyes, complete with spilling reams of paper, booklights, hats, coffee cups and spoons and three human beings who danced and acted the poem out, section by section, in a studio in midtown Manhattan.

We begin today’s New York Times Book Review with Liesl Schillinger’s review of The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman, edited by Stephen Pascal:

Leo Lerman once turned down an invitation from the king and queen of Spain so he could dine with the Conde Nast publishing magnate Donald Newhouse. Another time, he flatly rejected a “Narcissus naked” Yul Brynner, who was begging him to sleep with him and pathetically murmuring, “Why won’t you? Why won’t you?” The first, and probably only, woman Lerman …