Longer Chinua Achebe Interview on YouTube

A 26-minute interview with Chinua Achebe at the NYS Writers Institute in October 1998 is now
available on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKDupjm2fU8&feature=youtu.be

The giant of world literature and Hudson Valley resident passed away on March 21, 2013.

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In Search of America

The plotless (and widely acclaimed) novel Open City by Teju Cole (who visits Friday 2/10) is essentially a meandering story about meanderings.

At one point the Nigerian-American narrator visits an immigration detention center in Queens and meets a young Liberian man who has long nurtured dreams of emigrating to America.

The Liberian has undertaken an arduous journey from Liberia to Mali to Morocco to Spain to Portugal, gradually saving up enough money to purchase a false passport and fly to JFK airport in New York City. The narrator hears his story from behind a wall of plexiglass.

"The man who sat in front of me had a broad white smile. He was young, and dressed in an orange jumpsuit, as were all the other inmates. I introduced myself, and he smiled immediately and asked if I was African. He was as good-looking, as striking in appearance as any man I had ever seen. He had delicate cheekbones, a dark, even complexion, and the whites of his eyes were as vivid as his white teeth...."

To read more, buy the book.

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Exclusive Behind-the-Scenes Clip

The Hollywood Reporter posts an exclusive behind-the-scenes clip about the making of Slavery By Another Name, which premieres at Sundance on 1/23, before coming to a theater near you (the UAlbany Performing Arts Center) on 2/3.

"The documentary Slavery by Another Name will have its premiere Monday, Jan. 23, at noon at the Temple Theatre as part of the official 2012 Sundance Film Festival competition program. Sam Pollard, who was a longtime editor on Spike Lee’s films, directed the project, which takes a hard look at the many ways involuntary servitude continued for African Americans long after the abolition of slavery."

"THR here hosts an exclusive behind-the-scenes clip that features Pollard, executive producer Douglas Blackmon and several of the descendants whose stories are told in the film."

See the clip.

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Who Needs Plot?

Teju Cole, who visits Friday, Feb. 10, discards plot in his acclaimed first novel Open City, and the critics don't miss it.

Here's John Knight of The Millions:

“Every work begins as an obvious metaphor,” John Berger writes. “The metaphor allows [the artist] to imagine the familiar world from above, and his own liberation from it.” Most novels move beyond metaphor toward something resembling a plot; Teju Cole’s Open City (out this week in paperback) does not. Rather, it is itself a single metaphor: aimless wandering as a reading experience. More.

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Open City on Every "Best of 2011" We Can Think Of

Teju Cole's Open City, has been featured on innumerable “Best of 2011” lists in major publications and media outlets, including the New Yorker, New York Times, NPR, Dallas Morning News, Seattle Times, Atlantic, GQ, Guardian, New Statesman and TIME magazine.

Teju Cole visits Friday, Feb. 10th.

The book has been described by many critics as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man for the new millennium.

James Wood offers a lengthy review of the book, a tale of the wanderings of a Nigerian ex-pat through the streets of Manhattan, in the New Yorker in February 2011 (In a December issue, Wood also names Open City one of the five best books of 2011).

"At these moments, and, indeed, throughout Open City, one has the sense of a productive alienation, whereby Cole (or [his narrator] Julius) is able to see, with an outsider’s eyes, a slightly different, or somewhat transfigured, city. It is a place of constant deposit and erasure, like London in the work of Iain Sinclair (or in Sebald’s Austerlitz), and Julius is often drawn to the layers of sedimented historical suffering on which the city rests. There is, most obviously, the gaping void of Ground Zero: 'The place had become a metonym of its disaster: I remembered a tourist who once asked me how to get to 9/11: not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones.' " More.

Reviewer James Wood visited the Institute in February 2008.

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New Film About AIDS in Africa

Sheila Curran Bernard, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, and UAlbany Assistant Professor of History and Documentary Studies, is the cowriter of a new film about AIDS in Africa, Inside Story: The Science of HIV/AIDS.

The film premiered in South Africa on World AIDS Day, December 1, 2011 and premieres in the U.S. and Nigeria in 2012. It will be broadcast to nearly 300 million viewers throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and will reach millions more through a public/private distribution network.

Curran Bernard is also the script writer for SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME, based on Douglas A. Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the abuse of black laborers in the United States from the end of the Civil War through the middle of the 20th century. As part of the New York State Writers Institute Classic Film Series, Blackmon and Curran Bernard will answer questions immediately following the screening of SLAVERY on Friday, Feb. 3rd.

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