Research & Innovation

One winner will be selected by a panel of three to four writers or editors who are PEN America Members. The winner will receive a $25,000 cash prize intended to allow significant time and resources with which to pursue a subsequent work of fiction.

Buffy’s your typical cosplaying, retro-gaming, con-going geek girl, but as her high school graduation approaches, she finds she has an unwelcome guest in her mind: the text parser. Narrating her life like it’s a classic adventure game (cough Zork cough), the text parser forces her to interact with the world through a series of a typewritten commands: Finish school. Go to party. Fall in love.

At first it’s pretty cool. It’s not easy making the transition from high school to college. It’s not easy dealing with roommates. It’s not easy being in a new relationship with her lifelong crush. Buffy makes some huge mistakes along the way, but the text-parser lets her fix all of them.

It’s like having superpowers… until the text parser won’t shut up. Buffy is desperate to get rid of it, but no matter how many times she tries to restart or reset, the text parser won’t go away. Before long, her life starts to crumble: her friends grow apart, her roommates turn against her, and her boyfriend falls into a deep depression. Buffy’s life has become a game, but how can you win when there’s no final boss?

Narrated in the style of classic adventure games, Post–High School Reality Quest is a captivating coming-of-age story that T. E. Carter calls a “must read” for all gamers and YA fans.

Before a stunned audience, she flings an open jar of black ink at master photographer Robert Capa’s “Death on a Leipzig Balcony.” Jacob’s police detective fiancée, Martha Crauchet, is assigned to the ensuing interrogation. In My Darling Detective, Howard Norman delivers adelivers a fond nod to classic noir, as Jacob’s understanding of the man he has always assumed to be his father unravels against the darker truth of Robert Emil, a Halifax police officer suspected but never convicted of murdering two Jewish residents during the shocking upswing of anti-Semitism in 1945.

What are we to make of early modern playwrights’ seeming obsession with the various forms money takes, who has it and who does not, what it means to inherit it, what it means to lose it, the lengths characters will go to obtain and keep it, and what its purchasing power yields for them and their heirs? Why does the resolution of so many of Shakespeare's plays hinge on fiscal reparation? More broadly, what is the relation of dramatic form to economic thought? How did the economic practices of early modern London impinge on the theatrical enterprise? Answering these questions requires us to consider the crucial economic developments that distinguished early modern England: the advent of a viable consumer culture, the incidence of inflation, and the evolution of a culture of credit that over the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries gradually transformed an economy of trust into an economy of interest. This chapter analyzes the institution of the theater and the period's drama in light of an early modern culture of debt. It shows that attending to an early modern debt economy and the theater's participation in it allows for more complex understandings of the ways that plays stage economic problems, and even the ways that early modern English culture defines economics as an arena that includes moral and ethical conundrums revolving around dependency, freedom, and hierarchies of value.

Description:

Candy, a junior in boarding school, is kidnapped. The more time she spends with her mysterious and handsome captor, Levon, the more she learns the whole scheme is not just about ransom. It's about revenge. What began as a kidnapping is spiraling into a crazy road trip adventure as Candy and Levon find a lot of wrong ways to do the right thing.

"Like the best pop songs, Stewart Lewis's novel, Stealing Candy, hits all the right notes. It's funny, suspenseful, touching, sexy ... it's also a road trip, a love story, and an affecting portrait of two desperate characters. I ate it up." - Louis Bayard, New York Times Notable Author of Lucky Strikes

"Stealing Candy is that rare sort of read that keeps you not just guessing, but gasping with every turn of the page." - Kieran Scott, author of Pretty Fierce

"A page-turning, stay-up-late story. Readers are going to love Candy and her wonderful mix of resourcefulness and jaded innocence. " - Cammie McGovern, author of Say What You Will

When Pierre was published one year after Moby-Dick, expectations were high. Readers expected—and Melville delivered—adventure, humor, and brilliance. Magnificent and strange, Pierre is a richly allusive novel mirroring both antebellum America and Melville’s own life. This Norton Critical Edition includes: · The Harper & Brothers 1852 first edition of the novel, accompanied by Robert S. Levine and Cindy Weinstein’s editorial matter. · Six illustrations. · Contextual and source materials, including letters, responses to Pierre by Melville’s contemporaries, and works by Daniel Webster, Thomas Cole, James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others, that give readers a sense of Pierre’s time and place. · Seven critical essays on Pierre’s major themes by Sacvan Bercovitch, James Creech, Samuel Otter, Wyn Kelley, Cindy Weinstein, Jeffory A. Clymer, and Dominic Mastroianni. · A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.

From the publisher:

The first book to put contemporary affect theory into conversation with early modern studies,this volume demonstrates how questions of affect illuminate issues of cognition, political agency, historiography, and scientific thought in early modern literature and culture. Engaging various historical and theoretical perspectives, the essays in this volume bring affect to bear on early modern representations of bodies, passions, and social relations by exploring: the role of embodiment in political subjectivity and action; the interactions of human and non-human bodies within ecological systems; and the social and physiological dynamics of theatrical experience. Examining the complexly embodied experiences of leisure, sympathy, staged violence, courtiership, envy, suicide, and many other topics, the contributors open up new ways of understanding how Renaissance writers thought about the capacities, pleasures, and vulnerabilities of the human body.
 

Genie's summer is full of surprises. The first is that he and his big brother, Ernie, are leaving Brooklyn for the very first time to spend the summer with their grandparents all the way in Virginia! In the COUNTRY! The second surprise comes when Genie figures out that their grandfather is blind. Thunderstruck and being a curious kid, Genie peppers Grandpop with questions about how he covers it so well (besides wearing way cool Ray-Bans). How does he match his clothes? Know where to walk? Cook with a gas stove? Pour a glass of sweet tea without spilling it? Genie thinks Grandpop must be the bravest guy he's ever known, but he starts to notice that his grandfather never leaves the house as in NEVER. And when he finds the secret room that Grandpop is always disappearing into a room so full of songbirds and plants that it's almost as if it's been pulled inside-out, he begins to wonder if his grandfather is really so brave after all. Then Ernie lets him down in the bravery department. It's his fourteenth birthday, and, Grandpop says to become a man, you have to learn how to shoot a gun. Genie thinks that is AWESOME until he realizes Ernie has no interest in learning how to shoot. None. Nada. Dumbfounded by Ernie's reluctance, Genie is left to wonder is bravery and becoming a man only about proving something, or is it just as important to own up to what you won't do?

The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different.
- George Orwell, 1984

When I read about the group of women in Handmaid’s Tale red robes and white bonnets who staged a pro-choice protest in the Texas Senate the week of Monday, March 20th, I thought about the power of image. The group of women—channeling the characters in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel who were forced by the government to breed—sat silently in the senate gallery while the anti-abortion bills were passed. In videos posted on Instagram, we see them marching in the senate’s hallway, holding pro-choice signs written not on paper, but on white cloth. The white rectangles, displayed in front of them, one would say, in front of their bellies, swayed to the rhythm of their steps, as they silently follow one another in the eerie procession.

Read the essay here.

 

That we could, as we do, live in the realm of eternal mirrors,
working our way at the same time through unmowed grasses.
-    Czesław Miłosz

When on December 13th, 1991—the tenth anniversary of martial law being declared in communist Poland to crush the political opposition—I stepped on the tarmac of John F. Kennedy’s International Airport in New York, leaving Poland forever, I promised myself to forget who I was for the first 25 years of my life. I didn’t want to be political anymore. There was too much pain in it, and too much pain in remembering the extent to which it affected the lives of everyone I knew.

Read the essay here.