Vanessa Manko (left), Susan Minot (center), and Salman Rushdie (right)

Vanessa Manko and Judy Chicurel, two authors featured in a recent issue of Granta, have signed book deals with Penguin. To toast these two authors, the literary magazine threw a party.

The celebration took place at Granta editor John Freeman‘s Manhattan loft on Wednesday night, and brought together a community of writers and editors including: Salman Rushdie, Sean McDonald, Alex Gilvarry, Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam, and Peter Carey, to name a few.

Manko, whose novel was excerpted in Granta 118: Exit Strategies, sold her novel The Un-American to Penguin through her agent Caroline Michel. The title is slated for publication in spring 2014. Manko, who works as Rushdie’s assistant, spent seven years working on the book. In a toast to the author, Rushdie quipped that she’s going to need to speed things up in the future. Over drinks, Manko explained that her background in dance helped inform her writing as she looked for the cadence in her language. Read more

Texas Book Festival literary director Clay Smith has been named the new features editor at Kirkus Media.

Smith will expand the features section at the literary outlet, adding “more reported articles about writers and reading trends.” He had worked at the Texas Book Festival since 2005, booking hundreds of writers, including Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Salman Rushdie, Sandra Cisneros and Amy Sedaris.

Here’s more from the release: “he wrote for Publishers Weekly, indiewire.com, and Newsday, among others. He has recently written for The Daily Beast, Elle Décor, and Newsday. While at the Texas Book Festival, Smith worked closely with small and large publishers to create a diverse program of national and Texas writers. With the participation of the Litquake Foundation and other partners, he added Lit Crawl Austin to the Festival’s program and grew sales of books during the two-day weekend.”

PEN president Peter Godwin and World Voices chair Salman Rushdie have written a letter to the Chinese government, protesting its recent travel restrictions for artist Ai Weiwei.

This confinement means that Weiwei will most likely be unable to attend a PEN American Center event scheduled for October 11th in New York City. Here’s an excerpt from Godwin and Rushdie’s letter:

Like our colleagues throughout the world’s art and literary communities, we were shocked when Ai Weiwei was detained in 2011, and we are deeply disappointed to learn that he remains unable to travel freely and participate in international fora and conversations in which he has so clearly earned a place. We believe restricting his right to travel abroad risks violating Chinese and international laws, and that it does little to advance the goals and aspirations of the Chinese government and its people. We therefore entreat you to return Ai Weiwei’s passport immediately and lift all restrictions against him, allowing him to travel to represent his own work and his ideas.

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The lineup for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature has been revealed.  The annual event will be held in New York City from April 30th through May 6th.

Novelist and PEN World Voices chair Salman Rushdie will deliver the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture this year. The festival will feature Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, Graydon Carter, Michael Cunningham, Jennifer Egan, E.L. Doctorow, Tony Kushner, Herta Müller, Marjane Satrapi, Colson Whitehead and many other writers.

Rushdie had this statement in the release: “In an era of ever-expanding ‘screen-time,’ live/in-person readings, conversations and literary performances have never been more radical or more necessary … These live events break down the invisible walls that separate us into our own solitary computer pods and re-assert the importance of dialogue, activism, and community without borders.”

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Blogger Nay Phone Latt has been released from prison. Latt was arrested in 2008 after using his blog to share poetry, political criticism and social commentary in Myanmar (the country formerly known as Burma).

Yahoo! News reported that Myanmar’s government pardoned Latt and approximately 650 others under a massive act of prisoner amnesty. The Guardian has uploaded a gallery of photos chronicling this event; the first two feature Latt and his family.

Here’s more from PEN’s announcement: “[In November 2008, Latt] was sentenced by a specially-assembled court to a combined 20 years and six months in prison for blogging about the military crackdown against a popular uprising during the fall of 2007…On February 20, 2009, a court in Rangoon reduced his sentence by eight and a half years, leaving him to serve 12 years in Pa-an Prison in Karen State, 135 miles from Yangon.”

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Gilt City NY is offering a $95 deal featuring a signed copy of a Salman Rushdie book and a six-course gourmet dinner.

The meal will be held at Vermillion, a high end New York City restaurant which specializes in Indian-Latin fusion cuisine. Chef Maneet Chauhan will create a unique menu inspired by Rushdie’s work as well as the the popular bazaars in Bombay. Once purchased, the deal must be redeemed by January 31, 2012.

Here’s more about the deal: “The menu includes gourmet spins on Indian street food like Bombay Frankie chicken kebabs, crispy juhu ki pani puri, and hearty tawa sabzi pao. There’s also creamy corn khatkhate soup, succulent malvani quail in a coconut masala and rose-and-pistachio kulfi with falooda for dessert. Guests of the feast will take home a signed copy of one of Rushdie’s most acclaimed novels, either Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses or Luka and the Fire of Life.” What novel would you pick? (Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan)

So far, more than 1,300 writers have signed a new Writers in Support of the Occupy Movement petition.

The petition is composed of a single sentence: “We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.” The site now includes short essays by different writers, including Francine Prose, Lemony Snicket, D.A. Powell, Duncan Murrell, Anne Waldman, Danica Novgorodoff and Michael Voll, Maureen Miller, Daphne Carr, Alice Walker, Paula Z. Segal, John McManus, David Hollander, Blair Braverman, Scott Sparling, and Joshua Cohen.

So far, the petition has virtual signatures from Alison Bechdel, Samuel R. Delaney, Jennifer Egan, Barbara Ehrenreich, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem, Ann Patchett, Salman Rushdie and many other authors. You can sign at the bottom of the page, but the organizers are processing a huge influx of signatures.

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On September 13th, Chinese writer Liao Yiwu will appear in New York City for a reading, a musical performance and an on-stage interview organized by the Pen American Center.

Liao (pictured, via) is a poet, novelist, musician, and documentarian, once dubbed “the Studs Terkel of China.” The event will take place on the night before the official release of his new book God Is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China. Wen Huang translated the book.

Here’s more from the release: “[Mr. Liao] was denied permission to travel to New York for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature earlier this year, but escaped to Berlin via the Vietnamese border on July 6, 2011. Mr. Liao was imprisoned for four years in the 1990s for his epic poem ‘Massacre [excerpted here],’ a condemnation of the government’s bloody crackdown at Tiananmen Square, and has endured constant harassment since. Though all his books are banned in China, he has continued to write.”

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Booktrack has commissioned an entire score for a Salman Rushdie short story so readers can listen to a soundtrack (played by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra) while reading the eBook app.

Booktrack creates eBooks with a synchronized soundtrack, adding music, sound effects and ambient sound to the reading experience. On the Morning Media Menu today, we interviewed Brooke Geahan, the vice president and publisher at the new eBook company (introductory video embedded above).

Here’s an excerpt from the interview: “We are releasing ‘In the South,’ a beautiful story [Rushdie] wrote about two friends and the tsunami that hit India. For that we had composer John Psathas, an award winning musician and huge fan of Rushdie. So he jumped at the chance to actually read ‘In the South’ and interpret it–as well as compose a score for it.”

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Jack Around has won the beach towel Photoshop contest at The Paris Review. The image embedded on the side showcases “Ernest Hemingway,” the winning photograph.

The winner edited six photos for the contest. The pictures feature highly prolific writers such as George Orwell, Sir Salman Rushdie and Vladimir Nabokov.

Here’s more from the announcement: “The entries were truly staggering in their creativity and execution … Like I said, this wasn’t easy—but we were not going to argue with a man pointing a gun at us.”