PEN America's Literary Gala and the glamour of the written word | amNewYork

Finding oneself inside a book can feel private and immediate, whether through a sentence that understands a reader or a character whose flaws, humor, shame, hunger, or hope create connection. Reading can enlarge the world while making inner experiences feel less strange. Glamour is framed as intellectual and emotional expansion, where language offers charged intimacy by changing how someone feels inside their own skin. At a PEN America Literary Gala, writing was presented as a highest form of glamour rather than its opposite. Freedom of speech was positioned at the living center of culture, and the event gathered hundreds of cultural figures for the freedom to read, write, and speak.

"There is a private thrill in finding oneself inside a book. Not in a dramatic way, necessarily. Sometimes it is a sentence that understands you before you have understood yourself. Sometimes it is a character so flawed, funny, ashamed, hungry, or hopeful that you feel less alone for having met them. Reading can do that. It can make the world feel suddenly larger, while making one's own inner life feel less strange. That is glamour, too. Not the obvious kind."

"The deeper glamour is arguably intellectual. It is emotional expansion. It is the charged intimacy of language doing what luxury so often promises, yet rarely accomplishes: changing how one feels inside one's own skin. At PEN America's annual Literary Gala, hosted by B.J. Novak at the American Museum of Natural History, that idea became the evening's most powerful seduction."

"Novak, the actor, director, comedian, and bestselling author, did not treat writing as the opposite of glamour. Rather, he treated it as one of glamour's highest forms. Writing is glamorous. Reading is glamorous. Freedom of speech is glamorous, he told the room, placing literature not at the edge of culture, but at its living center."

"The gala gathered more than 600 writers, publishers, journalists, artists, and cultural figures for a night devoted to the freedom to read, write, and speak. Honorees included Ann Patche"

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