Friday, January 30, 2009

Notable Reviews for Evaristo's Novel of "Whyte Slavery"

Blonde Roots, Bernardine Evaristo's couter-historical novel about the slave trade in reverse is receiving superlatives in the American and British press.


Publisher's Weekly called it an "astonishing, uncomfortable and beautiful alternative history." The London Times called it, "astonishing... brilliant."

Former Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown addresses the novel's playful treatment of "body issues" in the London Telegraph: She's tall, slim, blonde and blue-eyed. So of course the heroine of Bernadine Evaristo's new novel has body issues. She could have her nose flattened, her skin darkened and get some kinky black hair woven on to her ugly blonde roots. But she's trying to respect her body the way it is: "Europane".

Writing in the Washington Post, Ron Charles said, "My only complaint about Bernardine Evaristo's alternate history of racial slavery is that it's 150 years late. Imagine the outrage this clever novel would have provoked alongside Harriet Beecher Stowe's incendiary story or Frederick Douglass's memoir! But now, amid the warm glow of 21st-century liberalism, with our brilliant black president, what could we possibly learn from a new satire of slavery?... Plenty."
Evaristo will visit the Writers Institute on Thursday, February 5, 2009.

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Thursday, January 29, 2009

"Blonde Roots" Becomes a Canadian Bestseller

Blonde Roots, Bernardine Evaristo's new counter-historical novel about Black Africans enslaving White Europeans has just arrived on the MacLean's Top Ten Hardcover Fiction list.

Evaristo will visit the Writers Institute on Thursday, February 5.

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Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Sue Miller to Visit Monday, February 2, 2009


Sue Miller will speak about her new novel, The Senator’s Wife (2008), about the private troubles of a political marriage between a hero of progressive causes and his shy, retiring wife.

"...Miller plays her hand in a masterly fashion. Shock, deceit, desire and despair come together at once in a way that feels simply like fate.... I saw in Miller what her fans have always seen: a clever storyteller with a penchant for the unexpected and a talent for depicting the bizarre borderline acts, the unfortunate boundary crossings and the regrettable instances of excessive self-indulgence that can destroy a world in a blink." --Judith Warner, New York Times

View the press release.

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Tuesday, January 27, 2009

"Ugh! Who would want to be caught reading that kind of trash?"

Sue Miller discusses the stigma of "women's literature" in a delightful 2002 profile in the UK Independent:

"Jonathan Franzen's discomfort at being taken up by Oprah and women readers opened up some intelligent American journalism about the schisms between male/female; high art/low art – 'womens' books' as opposed to serious books written by men," she says. "There's this whole notion, dominant in the 19th century, that writing novels was a pretty low art form, created for the daughters of shopkeepers to read."

Miller, who has been teaching an undergraduate class in creative writing at Amherst College, breaks into a hilarious grimace. "Ugh! Who would want to be caught reading that kind of trash?

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A "Federal Writers Project" for the New Great Depression

State by State, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey is a timely tribute to FDR's Federal Writers Project, a program that gave a variety of employment opportunities to writers during the last Great Depression. 50 writers present chapters on each of the 50 states.


Jayne Anne Phillips is the necessary author of the West Virginia chapter. Other authors who have been guests at the Institute include Susan Choi writing about Indiana, Rick Moody on Connecticut, Louise Erdrich on North Dakota, Ha Jin on Georgia, William Vollmann on California, Susan Orlean on Ohio, Dave Eggers on Illinois, and Tony Horwitz on Virginia.

Last but not least, the book features an Afterword on Washington, D.C. by Edward P. Jones.

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Saturday, January 17, 2009

New Writers Institute Video Postings on You Tube


The NYS Writers Institute has posted a run of short video clips of recent visitors.

http://www.youtube.com/user/NYSWritersInstitute

The materials are unvarnished, without setup. The idea is that you, the viewer, can eavesdrop on a conversation, or stumble upon an author presenting work.

The mix is eclectic, by design. A few poets, an historian, a filmmaker, short story writers, musicians, novelists. Anne Enright, Garrison Keillor, Li-Young Lee, Mary Gordon, Andre Dubus III, Frank McCourt, Major Jackson, etc, etc. A fun clip of One Ring Zero covering a Paul Auster piece. Frank Bidart talking about his first book. Garrison Keillor remembering the encyclopedia. Daniel Cassidy on Irish slang. Marie Howe on the Star Market.

There are too many of clips of authors simply reading their work on the web. We think it's more interesting to talk with them.

There are 18 clips up now, but they will rotate, and there will be more to come. Just a sample of one of the richest audio-video archives of contemporary literature.

Stay tuned.

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Friday, January 16, 2009

Poet W. D. Snodgrass Dies

Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,

We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.

--W. D. Snodgrass, "April Inventory"

Pulitzer Prize winning poet W. D. Snodgrass (1926-2009) died this week at his home in Madison County, New York, east of Syracuse. See Bob Hoover's obituary of the Pittsburgh native in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Summer Writing Workshop for High School Students


In summer the song sings itself....--William Carlos Williams, "The Botticellian Trees"

The New York State Writers Institute is pleased to announce the 2009 New York State Summer Young Writers Institute for high school students, which will take place July 19-25, 2009 at Skidmore University in Saratoga Springs, New York. The Summer Young Writers Institute is a not-for-profit, New York State-funded summer program for gifted writers entering 10th, 11th or 12th grade in September, 2009. The program, which offers workshops in poetry, prose and screenwriting, is open to both public and private school students who reside anywhere in New York State.

The New York State Summer Young Writers Institute permits student writers to interact with published writers, practice craft and meet other young writers from around the state.

Our website features an application, a brochure and a financial aid application.

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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Fiction Resurgent!

" After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed.... Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen." -- Motoko Rich, The New York Times

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Friday, January 9, 2009

Jayne Anne Phillips Event Press Release

JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS, MAJOR AMERICAN FICTION WRITER, AUTHOR OF FICTION ROOTED IN HER WEST VIRGINIA GIRLHOOD, TO OPEN THE WRITERS INSTITUTE’S SPRING SERIES JANUARY 27, 2009

CALENDAR LISTING:
Jayne Anne Phillips, major American novelist and short story writer, author of fiction rooted in her West Virginia girlhood, will discuss her work on Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 8:00 p.m. in the Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. Earlier that same day at 4:15 p.m. the author will present an informal seminar in Assembly Hall, Campus Center, on the uptown campus. The events are sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute and are free and open to the public.

Albany, NY – Jayne Anne Phillips, author of fiction rooted in her West Virginia girlhood, “stepped out of the ranks of her generation as one of its most gifted writers,” averred Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, adding that “Her quick, piercing tales of love and loss [show] a keen love of language, and a rare talent of illuminating the secret core of ordinary lives with clearsighted unsentimentality.”

Phillips is the author most recently of Lark and Termite (2009), a novel about the members of a West Virginia family struggling to survive during the 1950s at the time of the Korean War. The characters include Lark, a teenage girl forced by circumstances to assume the responsibilities of womanhood, and Termite, her profoundly disabled younger brother who, despite his impairments, enjoys a vivid inner life. The novel also follows the experiences of Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, amid the carnage and turmoil on the Korean peninsula.

In advance praise, novelist Junot Díaz called the new book, “extraordinary… luminous… It is an astounding feat of the imagination… the best novel I've read this year.” Alice Munro said, “This novel is cut like a diamond, with such sharp authenticity and bursts of light.” “New York Times” reviewer Michiko Kakutani called the novel “intricate” and “deeply felt” and described the characters as “so indelible, so intimately drawn, that they threaten to move in and take up permanent residence in the reader’s mind.”

Phillips’ earlier books include the short story collection “Black Tickets” (1979), and the novels “Machine Dreams” (1984), “Shelter” (1994) and “MotherKind” (2000).

Phillips’ first novel, “Machine Dreams,” tells the story of how a West Virginia family weathers the major events of the 20th century, from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War. Novelist Robert Stone said, “‘Machine Dreams’, in its wisdom and its compassionate, utterly unsentimental rendering of the American condition, will rank as one of the great books of [the] decade.”

“MotherKind” explores the spiritual education of a woman who must become the caretaker of her terminally ill mother during the early months of a young marriage and after the birth of her first child. The “Time” magazine reviewer said, “A passionate but indirect evocation of loss . . . Phillips concentrates on the day-to-day details of ordinary existence suddenly afflicted with extraordinary pressures and the conflicting tugs of joy and grief.”

Jayne Anne Phillips is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Bunting Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and both the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.
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Thursday, January 8, 2009

Lark and Termite gets a rave from Kakutani in the Times

"Jayne Anne Phillips's intricate, deeply felt new novel reverberates with echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac, McCullers and Michael Herr's war reporting, and yet it fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and utterly original."

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Ann Savage of Edgar G. Ulmer's "Detour" Dies

Ann Savage, inventor of the '40s femme fatale role, died on Dec. 27th at the age of 87. Savage is the star of Detour, Edgar G. Ulmer's classic low-budget 1945 film which (along with Ulmer's Bluebeard) will kick of the New York State Writers Institute's 2009 Classic Film Series. In the film Savage plays a woman who blackmails a luckless hitchhiker, played by Tom Neal. Detour is widely considered to be the film that defined her career.

The New York Times:
“It’s actually a showcase role,” [her manager] Kent Adamson said. “Neal and Savage really reversed the traditional male-female roles of the time. She’s vicious and predatory. She’s been called a harpy from hell, and in the film, too, she’s very sexually aggressive, and he’s very, very passive.”

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Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Jayne Anne Phillips pays homage to The Sound and the Fury

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

--William Shakespeare, “Macbeth,” Act V, Scene v

Jayne Anne Phillips pays homage to fellow Southerner William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in her remarkable new novel, Lark and Termite (January 2009), the story of a West Virginia family struggling to survive at the time of the Korean War. Both novels feature four points of view, stream-of-consciousness narratives, and mentally impaired characters with special gifts of vision and understanding.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Lorraine Adams said, “Phillips reinvigorates and transforms the Faulknerian infrastructure. Female voices, not the chorus of brothers Jason and Quentin, dominate in Lark and Termite…. While Faulkner chronicled the decay of the South through its men, Phillips adumbrates the nobility of Appalachia, of Korean refugees, of the least of us, by taking us into the “shaky territory” of women….”

Note: Fiction writer Jayne Anne Phillips will visit the Writers Institute on Tuesday, January 27, 2009. She will hold an informal workshop at 4:15 PM in Assembly Hall, Campus Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus, 1400 Washington Ave. In the evening, at 8 PM, Phillips will read from and discuss her new novel Lark and Termite in the Recital Hall of the Performing Arts Center on the uptown campus.

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Sunday, January 4, 2009

Spring 2009 Visiting Writers Series to feature Jayne Anne Phillips, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Alex Gibney

The Spring 2009 Visiting Writers series will feature an exciting line-up of writers distinguished in a variety of fields, including fiction, poetry, history, science writing, literary criticism, drama and screenwriting. Details will be announced shortly.

Here’s a glimpse of what you can look forward to in the coming months….

Jayne Anne Phillips, author of fiction rooted in her West Virginia girlhood, has been called one of the most gifted writers of her generation (Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times). Phillips is the author most recently of Lark and Termite (2009), a novel about the members of a West Virginia family struggling to survive during the 1950s at the time of the Korean War. The characters include Lark, a teenage girl forced by circumstances to assume the responsibilities of womanhood, and Termite, her profoundly disabled younger brother who, despite his impairments, enjoys an intricate inner life. In advance praise, novelist Junot Díaz called it, “extraordinary… luminous… It is an astounding feat of the imagination… the best novel I've read this year.” Alice Munro said, “This novel is cut like a diamond, with such sharp authenticity and bursts of light.” Phillips’ earlier books include Black Tickets (1979), Machine Dreams (1984), Shelter (1994) and MotherKind (2000).

Annette Gordon-Reed has been called, “one of the most astute, insightful, and forthright historians of this generation” (Edmund Morgan, The New York Review of Books). A Professor of History at Rutgers and Professor of Law at New York Law School, Gordon-Reed is the author of The Hemingses of Monticello (2008), winner of the 2008 National Book Award. The new book tells the story of multiple generations of Thomas Jefferson’s secret slave family. Earlier works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), which Jill Lepore called, “[A] tour de force. . . . a devastating brief on standards of evidence in historical research.” Gordon-Reed also coauthored Vernon Can Read! (2001), the autobiography of civil rights leader and Clinton confidant, Vernon Jordan.

Alex Gibney Documentary Film Series
We will host a visit by Alex Gibney, major documentary film director, in association with a screening of three of his major films: Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008), a finalist for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance; Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), which received the Academy Award for Best Documentary; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), which was nominated for the same Academy Award. Gibney also directed The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002), and is currently at work on Freakonomics (2009), based on the bestseller by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Gibney served as executive producer for the Iraqi war documentary No End in Sight (2007), an Academy Award contender, and served as series producer under Martin Scorcese for the 2003 PBS series “The Blues.”

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Saturday, January 3, 2009

Jayne Anne Phillips: “Teaching Shoots Writing in the Head”

Many writers confess to a love-hate relationship with teaching, a near-polar ambivalence. On the one hand, teaching appears to occupy—in a total, exclusive, and painfully distracting fashion— a part of the brain that is necessary for writing. On the other hand, teaching is a deeply satisfying and rewarding activity, one that keeps not only the writer, but also civilization itself, alive.

Jayne Anne Phillips, a beloved teacher and writer-in-residence at Boston and Brandeis Universities for many years, had this to say about the pressures of teaching in a 1998 essay that appears in the collection Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (1998), edited by Will Blythe:

“[T]eaching shoots writing in the head. Sometimes the writer lives on afterward, blinking to say what he wants. But it's like when you stop smoking: the writer quits teaching, and the lungs pick up in ten weeks, the brain relearns its functions. The writer is an autonomic nervous system, a heart that won't stop pumping.”

Ten years later she has succeeded in striking an impressive balance between competing professions. The architect of a newly-created creative writing program at Rutgers Newark that The Atlantic calls, “one of the most exciting in the country,” Phillips has also completed— despite the demands of her first full year as director of the program— a major new novel, Lark and Termite (January 2009).

Note: Fiction writer Jayne Anne Phillips will visit the Writers Institute on Tuesday, January 27, 2009. She will hold an informal workshop at 4:15 PM in Assembly Hall, Campus Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus, 1400 Washington Ave. In the evening, at 8 PM, Phillips will read from and discuss her new novel Lark and Termite in the Recital Hall of the Performing Arts Center on the uptown campus.

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Friday, January 2, 2009

Writers Institute to kick off Spring 2009 Classic Film Series with Edgar G. Ulmer Double Feature

Working with very small budgets, Edgar G. Ulmer developed a reputation for “spinning straw into gold” during his career as a director on “Poverty Row,” the Hollywood name for the short-lived, independent studios of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s. We present two of his best short features, each of them shot in only six days.

DETOUR (United States, 1945, 67 minutes, b/w)
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer
Starring Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake
Hailed by some as the best “B movie” ever made, Detour follows the bad luck of a musician who hitchhikes from New York to L.A., only to find himself trapped in a web of murder and intrigue. Critic David Thomson has called the film, “beyond remarkable…. a portrait of hell, and brilliantly done.”

BLUEBEARD (United States, 1944, 70 minutes, b/w)
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer
Starring John Carradine, Jean Parker, Nils Asther
This enduring cult classic features a Parisian painter and puppeteer who murders his models after he paints them. A recent review in Time Out London called the film, “a triumph of mind, eye and talent over the matter handed him by a [tight studio] budget.”

J. Hoberman, Village Voice film critic:

"One of the most versatile and resourceful filmmakers in movie history, Edgar George Ulmer (1900-1972), worked in a bewildering variety of genres, countries, and languages. Ulmer was born in what is now the Czech republic and raised in imperial Vienna; originally a student of architecture, he broke into the film industry as a teenager and, serving mainly as a set designer, shuttled back and forth between Berlin and Hollywood through the early ‘30s. After directing a highly successful horror film, The Black Cat, for Universal in 1934, Ulmer relocated to New York City where for five years he directed an assortment of independent “ethnic” features—including a quartet of Yiddish-language talkies that have since become classics. (Jewish, but not Yiddish-speaking, Ulmer worked with many of the leading actors and writers of New York’s Yiddish theater.) In 1941, Ulmer returned to Hollywood. There, among many other low-budget genre films, he made the quintessential film noir, Detour in 1945; his last movies were produced in Europe."

"An underground auteur, largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Ulmer has since taken his place among cinema’s legendary figures—an inspiration for the French new wave and a precursor of the American independent film movement, as well as an innovative and unique stylist in his own right."


Note: The films will be screened on Friday, January 30 at 7:30 PM in Page Hall, 135 Western Ave., on the University at Albany's downtown campus.

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