Wednesday afternoon, I went to hear Laila Lalami, creator of MoorishGirl.com and author of the short story collection Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, speak at a PEN World Voices panel on “history and the truth of fiction,” and when the discussion was over, I ran into Mark Sarvas, who flew in from Los Angeles to cover the festival for his blog, The Elegant Variation. (I wish we’d known that Victoria Redel was in the audience; as she writes, the themes of the discussion were quite relevant to her most recent novel, The Border of Truth.)
