"Acclaimed historian Patton (The Pattons) focuses on the war correspondent persona and the band of bold adventurers who earned their keep on the frontlines in this detailed salute. A first correspondent whose actions provided the template for all who followed, The Times of London's William H. Russell, respected battle, an appreciation that found him in the thick of the bloodiest clashes including the Battle of Bull Run, the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian war, and the Russo-Turkish war. In a no-frills, straightforward narrative, Patton describes the backgrounds of the early pioneers, John Russell Young, George Smalley, Holt White, and Henry Villard, who embraced armed conflict and its horrors, while feeding their dramatic observations to The New York Herald and The New York Tribune. The American publications dueled with each other, such as when Smalley opposed sending untried reporters into the battlefield, instead preferring two experienced correspondents dispatched to each army's headquarters. Some excitement is generated with the sections of the wild and brilliant career of American painter-war correspondent Frank Millet, who bravely covered the 1877 war in the Ottoman Empire. Patton's tribute to these battlefield scribes revives an understanding of why these men mattered." --Publishers Weekly
Patton visits today: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/patton_Robert14.html
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Hell Before Breakfast in Publishers Weekly
Monday, April 28, 2014
5 Writing Tips from Dinaw Mengestu in PW
Dinaw Mengestu, who visited us on March 13, offers five writing tips in the latest issue of Publishers Weekly:
1. Be generous to your characters: kill them, save them, break their hearts and then heal them. Stuff them with life, emotions, histories, objects and people they love, and once you've done that, once they are bursting at the seams, strip them bare. Find out what they look like—how they stand, talk move, when they have nothing left. Now put them back together, fill them once more with life, except now leave enough room for the reader to squeeze their own heart and imagination inside.
More: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/62003-5-writing-tips-dinaw-mengestu.html?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly&utm_campaign=25e089a2d2-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0bb2959cbb-25e089a2d2-304584381
More about Mengestu's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/mengestu_dinaw14.html
NYC Haikus in the NY Times
Marie Howe, NY State Poet under the auspices of the NYS Writers Institute, selected haikus about New York City in a National Poetry Month contest in the New York Times.
Here are two entries:
On the 6 to Spring
two cops help a tourist whose
map is upside down
Beware the puddle
of indeterminate depth
that swallows boots whole
More about Marie: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/howe_marie12.html Read More......
Bilingual Authors in the New York Times
Francesca Marciano, who visited us on April 11 is prominently featured in a New York Times article
on authors who choose to write in English instead of their native languages:
Some bilingual writers find it liberating to escape from their native language. “I think that I have fewer tools than if I were writing in Italian, but my voice is freer,” Ms. Marciano said.
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/books/writing-in-english-novelists-find-inventive-new-voices.html?_r=0
More on Francesca's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/marciano_francesca14.html
Robert Patton Tuesday, Grandson of General George Patton
Robert Patton, grandson of the legendary WWII General George S. Patton will present his new nonfiction book, Hell Before Breakfast: America's First War Correspondents Making History and Headlines, from the Battlefields of the Civil War to the Far Reaches of the Ottoman Empire (May 2014), tomorrow, Tuesday, April 29th.
More about the events: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/patton_Robert14.html
Booklist said: “A fascinating cast of characters…Patton details major conflagrations and social and technological changes amid the gore of war and the prose of reporters of another era.”
More about the book: http://www.randomhouse.com/book/128217/hell-before-breakfast-by-robert-h-patton#praise
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Sweet Dreams in the L. A. Times
Kenneth Turan reviews Sweet Dreams (to be screened Friday, followed by Q&A with actress and ice cream entrepreneur Jennie Dundas) in the L. A. Times:
'Sweet Dreams' is the story of the first ice cream shop in Rwanda and the remarkable group of female drummers who overcame incredible suffering to make it happen.... The most memorable thing about "Sweet Dreams" is that it allows us to experience the resilience, the capacity for happiness these women retain in spite of all they've been through. There's a lesson there for all of us.
More in the L. A. Times: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-sweet-dreams-20131129,0,180521.story#ixzz2zoKZuLut
More about Friday's event: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/dundas_jennifer14.html Read More......
Jennifer Dundas, Stage and Screen Credits
More about Friday's event: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/dundas_jennifer14.html
From Wikipedia:
Jennifer Dundas (born January 14, 1971 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American actress best known for her role as Chris Paradis, Diane Keaton's lesbian daughter, in The First Wives Club. Other selected films include Puccini for Beginners, Legal Eagles, The Beniker Gang and The Hotel New Hampshire. Dundas has guest starred in TV shows such as Desperate Housewives and Law and Order: Criminal Intent. She has also performed in the New York Theatre, including the play Arcadia. She won an Obie (Off-Broadway) Award for her performance in Good as New by Peter Hedges.
From IMDB:
In addition to her film credits, Jennifer Dundas has had a long and distinguished career in the New York theatre. She starred in the American premieres of Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" opposite Billy Crudup on Broadway, "Iron" and "Further Than The Furthest Thing" at Manhattan Theatre Club. She created the role of Edie in the world premiere of Jules Feiffer's "Grownups" on Broadway, and she originated Maggie in Peter Hedges' "Good As New" opposite John Spencer at Manhattan Class Company, for which she received an OBIE Award. Her acclaimed New York performances include "The Little Foxes" opposite Stockard Channing, "Ah, Wilderness!" with Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards, "As You Like It" (Shakespeare In The Park, directed by Mark Lamos), and "A Winter's Tale" with Christopher Reeve and Mandy Patinkin (Public Theatre, directed by James Lapine). Ms. Dundas' other notable performances include Laura in "The Glass Menagerie" opposite Sally Field at the Kennedy Center, Raina in "Arms and The Man" opposite Eric Stoltz at Williamstown, Hermia in Sir Peter Hall's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Ahmanson, and Dunyasha in "The Cherry Orchard" opposite Annette Bening and Alfred Molina at the Mark Taper Forum. She has played starring roles at Trinity Rep, Yale Rep, Seattle Rep, American Repertory Theatre, South Coast Rep, Long Wharf Theater and many others.
In 1995, Ms. Dundas was honored by American Theatre Magazine as one of six New Faces of The Year. Featured on the cover with her were fellow honorees Billy Crudup, Megan Mullally, Justin Kirk, Rufus Sewell, and Jude Law.
Originally from Newton, MA, Ms. Dundas made her Broadway debut at age ten, and appeared in her first film at age eleven.
In summer '06 she went "home" to Boston to play Kate in "The Taming of the Shrew" at the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company on Boston Common, which was estimated to have been viewed by over 75,000 people in a period of three weeks.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: A. Howard Read More......
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Judaic Studies Annual Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) Lecture
Anne Frank: From Diary to Book
Monday, April 28, 7PM, Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus
Read More......
Lessons Learned from Pain: Akhil Sharma
"Indeed, if Family Life is read as nonfiction ("Almost everything in the novel is true," Sharma's been quoted as saying), it might be considered a parenting guide on how not to cope. Viewed as a novel, however, it's both a tragicomic and ultimately accepting immigrant's tale."
More in the Times Union: http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Lessons-learned-from-pain-5410864.php
More about Sharma's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#sharma Read More......
Monday, April 21, 2014
"I don't want to be called an immigrant novelist" -Akhil Sharma
Akhil Sharma (who visits tomorrow) in a Salon interview this past Sunday:
You’ve said that you want this book to be “useful.” Useful how?
Because the subject matter of this book is so important to me – illness, children in difficulty, the Indian immigrant community – I care a great deal about being able to provide comfort to people who are in a similar situation to the one that I and my family were in.
New Event: Richard Ravitch Wednesday
Former lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch April 23 (Wednesday)
Discussion — 1:00 p.m., Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government
411 State Street, Albany
More: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/ravitch_richard14.html
Free and open to the public.
Read More......
New Event: Fossieck Lecture Wednesday
April 23, 2014 12:30 PM
Science Library - Standish Room
Free and open to the public.
Friday, April 18, 2014
Akhil Sharma in The Paris Review
This terrible, improbably funny book—about a single mother forced to share an apartment with the father who raped her as a child—won Sharma a PEN/Hemingway prize, a Whiting Award, and praise from the likes of Jonathan Franzen and Joyce Carol Oates. (I remember because it was the first novel I had the honor of editing.) Now Sharma is back with Family Life, the tale of an Indian American boy coming of age in the shadow of a family disaster. "
"It too is terrible and improbably funny, and is excerpted in this week’s New Yorker. With acid, deceptively artless prose and a faultless ear for dialogue, Sharma strips his characters bare from page one and dares us to love them in their nakedness. I cannot think of a more honest or unsparing novelist in our generation." —Lorin Stein, The Paris Review
More about Sharma's events in Albany: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/sharma_akhil14.html Read More......
Akhil Sharma in the NY Times Book Review
Here's a review of Akhil Sharma's new novel, Family Life from the front page of the New York Times Book Review.
“Where is Ajay? What was the point of having raised him?” an elderly woman grumbles to her husband about their adult son in the opening pages of Akhil Sharma’s semi-autobiographical new novel, “Family Life.” This book, deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender at its core, charts the young life of Ajay Mishra as he struggles to grow within a family shattered by loss and disoriented by a recent move from India to America. “Family Life” is equally the story of Ajay’s parents, whose response to grief renders them unable to find the space in which to cherish and raise him.
More in the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/books/review/akhil-sharmas-family-life.html?_r=0
Sharma visits the Writers Institute this coming Tuesday, April 22nd:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/sharma_akhil14.html Read More......
Gabriel García Márquez (1927 – 2014)
The New York Times obituary:
Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” would sell tens of millions of copies. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since ‘Don Quixote.’ ” The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”
More in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/books/gabriel-garcia-marquez-literary-pioneer-dies-at-87.html?_r=0
Friday, April 11, 2014
Lydia Davis Interviewed on NPR
Lydia Davis, Writers Institute Writing Fellow who will be the featured guest at RPI's 73rd Annual McKinney Writing Contest and Reading (Wed., April 16, free and open to the public) was interviewed last week by NPR's Rachel Martin.
More about Lydia's appearance at Rensselaer: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/davis_lydia14.html
From Rachel Martin's interview:
On the moment when she realized that she didn't need to write long to write well
I can date that pretty precisely to the fall of 1973. So I was 26 years old and I had just been reading the short stories or the prose poems of Russell Edson. And for some reason, I was sparked by those. I thought, "These are fun to read, and provocative and interesting, and I'd like to try this." So I set myself the challenge of writing two very short stories every day just to see what would happen.
On how she knows when to end a story
I think I have a sense right in the beginning of how big an idea it is and how much room it needs, and, almost more importantly, how long it would sustain anybody's interest. And that's sometimes been a problem with a story when it's sort of offered me two ways that it could go, and I have to choose one or the other.
More on the NPR website: http://www.npr.org/2014/04/06/299053017/lydia-davis-new-collection-has-stories-shorter-than-this-headline
Read More......
Lynne Tillman's New Book in the New Yorker
What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (April 2014) is a new collection of essays and criticism by UAlbany English Professor Lynne Tillman.
Here's a profile of Tillman from the introduction to the new book by Irish writer Colm Tóibín posted on the New Yorker blog:
"She was wearing black; she had a glass of whiskey on the rocks in her hand. Her delivery was dry, deadpan, deliberate. There was an ironic undertow in her voice, and a sense that she had it in for earnestness, easy emotion, realism. She exuded a tone which was considered, examined and then re-examined. She understood, it seemed to me, that everything she said would have to be able to survive the listeners’ intelligence and sense of irony; her own intelligence was high and refined, her sense of irony knowing and humorous. I had not come across anyone like her before...."
More: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/04/on-lynne-tillman.html
Here's a review from Bookforum:
More: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_01/13002
And here's some assorted praise:
"Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine — not because I 'admire' her writing, (although I do, very, very much), but because I feel it. Imagine driving alone at night. You turn on the radio and hear a song that seems to say it all. That's how I feel...:" — Jonathan Safran Foer
"Lynne Tillman's writing is bracing, absurd, argumentative, and luminous. She never fails to exhibit her unique capacities for watchfulness and astonishment." — Jonathan Lethem
"Like an acupuncturist, Lynne Tillman knows the precise points in which to sink her delicate probes. One of the biggest problems in composing fiction is understanding what to leave out; no one is more severe, more elegant, more shocking in her reticences than Tillman." — Edmund White
Read More......
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Francesca Marciano in Lina Wertmuller's "Seven Beauties"
Friday's guest Francesca Marciano starred in a number of Italian films prior to achieving success as a fiction writer and screenwriter.
Her credits include the virgin Carolina [pictured here, billed as "Francesca Marciani"] in Lina Wertmüller's outrageous 1975 film Seven Beauties, which was nominated for four Oscars.
Other film roles include the second-billed "Francesca" in Pupi Avati's The House of the Laughing Windows (1976) and Tutti defunti... tranne i morti (1977); and the Italian TV miniseries, La riva di Charleston (1978).
More about Marciano: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/marciano_francesca14.html
Read More......
Julia Glass on Francesca Marciano
Last week's guest, National Book Award winner Julia Glass [pictured here], contributes a praise blurb to this Friday's guest's new story collection, The Other Language:
“I loved every single one of these affecting, suspenseful, and sublimely crafted stories. It’s clear that Francesca Marciano is worldly as well as wise, yet what she’s surprisingly insightful about is the hazardous nature of worldliness itself. Because our modern lives are so mobile, our ways of communicating so refined, we risk coming to believe that the borders defining class, culture, and gender are somehow more permeable. Think again, she tells us in these nine cautionary tales—the best new collection I’ve read in years.” —Julia Glass
Francesca Marciano visits tomorrow:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/marciano_francesca14.html
The Other Language in Oprah's O. magazine
Amy Fine Collins of O. magazine reviews the new story collection by Francesca Marciano who visits Albany tomorrow:
“Seductive, cosmopolitan . . . In The Other Language, romance is the cure for ennui. Marciano’s heroines take the kind of risks most of us have been conditioned to avoid: they reconnect with lost lovers, migrate to faraway lands, and forge liaisons beyond the bounds of their race, culture, and class. Marciano is an apt guide to these exotic lives, [and] she engages us intimately with them . . . Frustrated communication is a recurrent theme, as is the quest for the elusive person or place that allows one to feel at home. In Marciano’s nuanced emotional universe, a foreigner is likely to consider herself an outsider, no matter how long she’s lived elsewhere—especially if she still dreams in her mother tongue.”
More about Marciano's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#marciano
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
Francesca Marciano on the Pantheon Blog
Francesca Marciano, Italian fiction author who writes in English (except for major award-nominated screenplays, which she writes in Italian), talks about her new story collection, The Other Language, on the Pantheon Books blog.
"Honey" film reviewed in the LA Times
Sheri Linden of the Los Angeles Times reviews the new Italian film Honey [Miele], coscripted by Francesca Marciano, who visits the Writers Institute to talk about the film (an official selection at Cannes) this coming Friday:
Whether she's trysting with her married lover or helping other people die, the title character of Honey is a fascinating and complex figure, and Jasmine Trinca inhabits the role with a detached intensity that's thoroughly compelling.
The Italian film — the assured feature-directing debut by actress Valeria Golino, still best known to American audiences for Rain Man — achieves the rare feat of addressing euthanasia head-on without devolving into a dramatized treatise or a button-pushing issue movie.
More in the L. A. Times: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-honey-review-20140314,0,2797373.story#axzz2yPD5PNdZ
More about our events with Francesca Marciano: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/marciano_francesca14.html Read More......
Monday, April 7, 2014
Peter Matthiessen (1927 - 2014)
Peter Matthiessen, major American writer and former New York State Author under the auspices of
the New York State Writers Institute (1995-1997) has died at the age of 86.
Here's the New York Times obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/books/peter-matthiessen-author-and-naturalist-is-dead-at-86.html?_r=0
Picture: Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William Kennedy and UAlbany President Karen Hitchcock at the Writers Institute's 1995 New York State Author and Poet awards ceremony.
Christopher Durang to Play Vanya
From the New York Times:
The playwright Christopher Durang, who wrote “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” is set to star as Vanya in a coming production at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pa., the producers announced. The comedy, which takes place in Bucks County and won a Tony last year for best play, is scheduled to run from July 17 to Aug. 10. Marilu Henner (“Taxi”) has been cast as Masha, a role played by Sigourney Weaver in the Off Broadway and Broadway productions. Vanya was originally played by David Hyde Pierce. The production is to be directed by Sheryl Kaller (“Mothers and Sons”).
More about Durang's Albany visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/durang_chris14.html Read More......
Francesca Marciano in the New York Times
Michiko Kakutani reviews the new story collection, The Other Language (2014), by acclaimed Italian author and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Francesca Marciano, who visits the Writers Institute this coming Friday.
"Francesca Marciano’s magical, fleet-footed stories leap around the globe, from Rome to New York to Mombasa, from a small Greek village to a remote island off the coast of Tanzania to a fortress on the banks of the Narmada River in India. She has an uncanny ability to conjure specific places...."
More in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/books/no-safe-harbor-for-travelers-in-the-other-language.html
More about Marciano's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/marciano_francesca14.html
Friday, April 4, 2014
A Play About August Strindberg's Daughter
Karin Smirnoff (pictured here) and her relationship with her overbearing father, August Strindberg (1849-1912), Swedish playwright and towering figure of world literature, are the subjects of a new play by theatre historian Eszter Szalczer. The play will be performed as a staged reading by seven accomplished local actors. Free and open to the public.
Dramatic Reading of the new play How It Really Happened with playwright Eszter Szalczer, followed by Q&A with playwright, director and cast
April 8 (Tuesday)
Dramatic Reading – 7:00 p.m. [Note early start time],
Science Library 340, Uptown Campus
Directed by W. Langdon Brown, with cast members Janet Hurley Kimlicko, Steve Madore, Gary Maggio, Patrick McKenna, Barbara Richards, Eileen Schuyler and Don Paul Shannon
Whose story is the true story? How can one grasp control of the narratives of one’s own life? Working on her new book, writer Karin Smirnoff (1880-1973) struggles to come to terms with her past in an attempt to challenge the notorious stories of her overbearing father, the world-renowned author and dramatist August Strindberg.
Eszter Szalczer is a dramaturg, theatre historian, and scholar of modern drama. Her recent book August Strindberg (2010) focuses on the Swedish playwright as one of the most radical innovators of the modern stage. It was when working on her previous book, Writing Daughters: August Strindberg's Other Voices (Norvik Press 2008) that Eszter became interested in exploring the creative processes of writing, the role of memory, the fine line between fiction and non-fiction, and how the same story could be told differently from several different perspectives.
For more information contact the Writers Institute at 442-5620, or visit us online at www.albany.edu/writers-inst, or on our blog at nyswiblog.blogspot.com.
Also, please sign up for regular updates from our blog: http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=WritersInstituteBlog&loc=en_US
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Stephen Kinzer visits Monday to present "The Brothers"
From the Washington Post, November 14, 2013:
Stephen Kinzer’s “The Brothers”tells the story of two siblings who achieved remarkable influence, serving as secretary of state and director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the Eisenhower administration. It is a bracing and disturbing study of the exercise of American global power.
Kinzer, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, displays a commanding grasp of the vast documentary record, taking the reader deep inside the first decades of the Cold War. He brings a veteran journalist’s sense of character, moment and detail. And he writes with a cool and frequently elegant style. The most consequential aspect of Kinzer’s work is his devastating critique of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who are depicted as jointly responsible for acts of extreme geopolitical myopia, grave operational incompetence and misguided adherence to a creed of corporate globalism.
More in the WP: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-the-brothers-on-john-foster-dulles-and-allen-dulles-by-stephen-kinzer/2013/11/14/a1ddf9ba-3683-11e3-be86-6aeaa439845b_story.html
More about Kinzer's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/kinzer_stephen14.html
Silent Film Tonight: The Docks of New York
This masterpiece by Josef von
Sternberg belongs to the last years of silent cinema (1928), the period in
which the form, facing extinction, achieved perfection. There's no waste, no
excess, in Sternberg's production: the melodramatic plot (a ship's stoker rescues
a girl from suicide, marries her, and takes the rap for a minor crime she is
accused of) is so familiar and so desultorily presented that it's barely
perceptible, and the acting is minimal, confined to ritual gestures endlessly
repeated. Sternberg suppresses direct emotional appeal to concentrate on
something infinitely fine: a series of minute, discrete moral discoveries and
philosophical realignments among his characters. --Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader,
2013
THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK
April 4 (Friday)
Film screening — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
Directed by Josef von Sternberg
(United States, 1928, 76 minutes, b/w, silent with live musical accompaniment
by Mike Schiffer)
Starring George Bancroft, Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova
In this 1928 silent masterpiece
directed by Josef von Sternberg, a steamboat stoker working on the New York
City waterfront saves a suicidal woman who has jumped off a pier into the briny
water below. The selfless act changes his life forever.
Read More......
Thursday, April 3, 2014
New Event-- Staged Reading of a New Play
HOW IT REALLY HAPPENED