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MetaxuCafe UpdatesSearching Member Sites
I’ve recently added a search function so that you can limit your Google search to just the blogs that are members of MetaxuCafe. I think that will be a good resource for everyone looking for literary topics online and you’ll find it right on the front page as well as other places on the site. Now if you want to read about, say Orhan Pamuk, but only want to search the litblogs you trust, you can narrow your search right here.
Bill Marx at the PEN World Voices Festival
by Bud Parr on May 01, 2008
Arts critic Bill Marx writes at The Arts Fuse about a PEN press conference this morning on the delivery of a petition to the Chinese Mission to the UN that asks for the release of imprisoned Chinese writers. He had this to say:
The gathering was short and sweet but also moving. Both Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan focused their brief remarks on the not-to-be-underestimated value of shaming the Chinese goverment into allowing more freedom of expression....
The word here from Chinese translator Wen Huang is that the authorities have been moving “questionable” writers away from Beijing and other major cities over the last few months in an effort to keep them far from journalists. Wen Huang has a new book out now made up of his translations of dissident writer Liao Yiwa’s interviews with everyday Chinese. That volume, entited “Corpse Walker, True Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up,” is available now — it applies a Studs Terkel approach to exploring what it is like to live in China.
I have noticed PEN making what seems to me a better connection this year between the festival and their overall mission, putting an empty chair on stage of an event I attended to symbolize missing writers. That’s good, particularly since the festival is getting far greater press than in the past.
Read Bill’s post at The Arts Fuse, and read the press release at the PEN Website.
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