I hate to sing the praises of NPR yet again, but WNYC’s On The Media recently brought to my attention a literary anthology called Writers on America, published by (of all things) the State Department. It’s being distributed overseas, and only overseas, because of the Smith-Mundt Act. As a work published explicitly to influence foreign audiences, it constitutes official propaganda, and it is therefore illegal for the US to publish or disseminate the book domestically. The OTM interviewer asked George Clack what, hypothetically speaking of course, would the Smith-Mundt Act entail in terms of web publication? Clack replied, hypothetically speaking of course, that he would not be allowed to distribute the URL of such a publication, but that if one knew about it and one were not an employee of the State Department, one would be allowed legally to do whatever one wanted with it. Only State Department employees are barred from enabling the dissemination of official propaganda; the trick, of course, is that only State Department employees usually know where it is.

Google, however, knows where everything is. You can read the anthology here, and it’s actually worth it for more than the illicit thrill of perusing unavailable material; contributing writers include Robert Pinksy, former Poet Laureate of the US (whose translation of Dante’s Inferno, incidentally, is not to be missed). There’s also Richard Ford, Julia Alvarez, and Bharati Mukherjee, among others.

I was curious about the State Department’s motivation in releasing such a work at all. I’m probably oversimplifying, but it does seem like the sort of people who might be interested in reading an anthology of American writers’ thoughts on America might also be capable of (heaven forbid) thinking for themselves about the subject - in other words, isn’t the State Department just preaching to the choir? This is from the collection’s introduction: This book originated as an intriguing suggestion by Mark Jacobs, a U.S. foreign service officer with our State Department staff who also happens to be a working novelist. If we were to ask a contemporary group of American poets, novelists, critics, and historians what it means to be an American writer, Jacobs proposed, the results could illuminate in an interesting way certain America values - freedom, diversity, democracy - that may not be well understood in all parts of the world.

Well, if they say so. I’m reminded of a back issue of Granta I read perhaps last year - What We Think Of America is also a collection of works on the US, but perhaps more interestingly the pieces were written by non-American writers. You can read a handful of selections on the Granta site, or order the entire issue - unlike Writers on America, it’s freely available to the public (American or otherwise).