Burn This Book
PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word

Contains stories that include "Witness: The Inward Testimony", "Freedom to Write", "The Value of the Word", and "The Master and the Margarita".

In "Witness: The Inward Testimony" Nadine Gordimer discusses the role of the writer as observer, and as someone who sees 'what is really taking place'. She looks to Proust, Oe, Flaubert, Graham Green to see how their philosophy squares with her own, ultimately concluding 'Literature has been and remains a means of people rediscovering themselves.' In "Freedom to Write", Orhan Pamuk elegantly describes escorting Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter around Turkey and how that experience changed his life. In "The Value of the Word" Salman Rushdie shares a story from Bulgakov's novel "The Master and the Margarita" in which the Devil talks to a frustrated writer called 'The Master'. The writer is so upset with his own work he decides to burn it: 'How could you do that?' the Devil asks...'Manuscripts do not burn'. Indeed, manuscripts do not burn, Rushdie argues, but writers do. The contributors include Chris Abani, Paul Auster, Russell Banks, Jonathan Franzen, Nadine Gordimer, David Grossman, Pico Iyer, Rick Moody, Toni Morrison, Orhan Pamuk, Ed Park, Francine Prose, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Safran Foer, and others.