Gaiman, Bechdel among new hosts at PEN gala.

• Author: Italie, Hillel
• Position: Living

Byline: Hillel Italie

NEW YORK -- Neil Gaiman, Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel are among the writers who have agreed to be table hosts at Tuesday's PEN American Center gala after six authors withdrew in protest of an award being given to the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The literary and human rights organization told The Associated Press this weekend that the other new hosts are George Packer, Azar Mafisi and Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese-born French author who will present the award to Hebdo's editor in chief Gerard Biard and critic and essayist Jean-Baptiste Thore. PEN is giving the magazine a Freedom of Expression Courage award, a decision that has been fiercely defended and criticized.

"I was honored to be invited to host a table,'' Gaiman wrote in an email Sunday to The Associated Press. "The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are getting an award for courage: They continued putting out their magazine after the offices were firebombed, and the survivors have continued following the murders.''

The literary world has been in a civil war of words since PEN announced last week that Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose and four other table hosts pulled out from the gala, citing what they say are the offensive cartoons of Muslims in Charlie Hebdo. A stream of tweets, letters, Facebook postings and opinion pieces has divided old friends such as former PEN presidents Prose and Salman Rushdie, a leading backer of the honor, and even set siblings on opposite sides. Author-journalist Masha Gessen is a table host, while her brother, author and magazine editor Keith Gessen, is among more than 200 writers and others in publishing who have signed an open letter objecting to the award.

"I haven't discussed the award controversy with my brother, but this isn't the first time he and I have disagreed on a political issue,'' Masha Gessen told the AP in a recent email...