What with the recent announcement of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature (congrats, Doris Lessing!), we’ve lately been reading the New Press’s timely collection of literature-laureate lectures from the past twenty years. The group within is astonishingly talented, of course, but the force of their political opinions is what truly distinguishes them. As the Spanish novelist Camilo José Cela says at the end of his speech, literature is “a weapon that can cleave the way forward in the endless march to freedom.”