PEN on Twitter

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Here is a list of things you can do to celebrate Banned Books Week, which kicks off today.

Salman Rushdie joins Twitter (@SalmanRushdie), goes to the mattresses with an imposter. Order is restored in the land.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals again refuses to toss out a suit brought by PEN American Center, the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and other organizations against the FISA Amendments Act permitting warrantless wiretapping by the NSA. The case could soon proceed in federal court. 

Ray Bradbury, The Woman Warrior, and CSIfive literary lectures you can watch in bed, when you should be in class.

Detained opposition leaders in Iran spark a run on Gabriel García Márquez’s 1996 novel News of a Kidnapping.

When art becomes dangerous: Sala Udin talks with Amiri Baraka about Civil Rights, the Black Arts Movement, and Obama’s struggle (or lack thereof).

Fan of minimalist writing apps like Ommwriter and iA writerQuietWrite takes it to the cloud.

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I have had days of unaccountable depression in which I sat in my studio and looked out along the burnt meadow to where the ice factory makes its hushing, cool sound of constantly pouring water, and then over to the Doll factory in whose windows I have never glanced, and I have torn up page after page of bad stuff written during the morning. Then I lock up my typewriter, fling my leg over my brother’s bicycle and ride, clicking gently, for the thing has a free-wheeling mechanism on it, all down to the sea. I find great refreshment in the sea, it is so irrevocably old and it says to me, little man, what are your problems? Fifty years from now where will you be? And I have been here forever, passing between man and earth in passionate exchanges and gentle redistributions.

Ray Bradbury (from Becoming Ray Bradbury by Jonathan R. Eller; University of Illinois Press, 2011)

Happy birthday, Mr. Bradbury.