Journalist Kent Russell, who visits us on Thursday 3/12, talks to the Times Union's Elizabeth Floyd Mair about his new book, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (2015).
Q: Did the essays in this book start out as separate essays, or was the idea to write a book-length exploration of masculinity?
A: [S]ubconsciously, I was always chasing the same subject matter: ill-tempered white dudes and their strategies for coping with the loss of power. Subconsciously, I was always writing the book.
More in the Times Union: http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-features/article/Man-cave-dwellers-6118822.php
More about Russell's upcoming visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/russell_kent15.html
Showing posts with label essays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label essays. Show all posts
Monday, March 9, 2015
Ill-Tempered White Dudes & Their Loss of Power
Friday, April 11, 2014
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:
I’ve long admired Lynne Tillman’s criticism. Her writing is founded on curiosity and deep feeling. It’s precise and imaginative, devoid of jargon or cliché. It’s the opposite of what I dislike in criticism, and I know I’m not alone in my appreciation of what she does. “What she does” is hard to pinpoint, though, and the title of her new collection is a good-natured fake-out for all of us who might look to her as a model for how to live—or just how to write.
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......
Monday, October 28, 2013
Douglas Bauer on Marriage, Aging, Life, Death
Douglas Bauer, who visits the Writers Institute tomorrow, 10/29, to present his new book, What Happens Next, Matters of Life and Death, is interviewed by Elizabeth Floyd Mair in the Times Union.
Q: What was the most surprising thing that you learned in the course of writing this book?
A: That I could write it. Until now, all my nonfiction has been about other people. Or it's concerned itself with literary matters. And I struggled in this book to find a balance between what seemed necessary to reveal about myself and my great reluctance to reveal anything, however important to the narrative.
More in the TU: http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/Focus-on-marriage-aging-4923207.php
More about Bauer's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/bauer_douglas13.html
"Essayist Douglas Bauer examines future exquisitely"
Douglas Bauer's new collection of essays about life and death and his Iowa farm boyhood is reviewed in his hometown newspaper, the eastern Iowa Gazette, October 27, 2013:
"While it’s common to wonder what happens after we die, it’s not as common — or as pleasing a discussion at a party, say — to speculate on how we will age and eventually pass."
"However, this question posed itself quite plainly to author and essayist Douglas Bauer when, in his early sixties, he found himself needing a series of routine surgical procedures. As he was waking up from the first of two cataract surgeries, Bauer received word that his mother passed away.This experience was the catalyst for Bauer’s moving collection of personal essays, 'What Happens Next?' (University of Iowa Press)."
Read more in The Gazette: http://thegazette.com/2013/10/27/essayist-douglas-bauer-examines-future-exquisitely/
Read more about Douglas Bauer's event tomorrow, Tuesday, 10/28: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/bauer_douglas13.html
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
PEN America Announces 2013 Literary Awards
Among this year's winners of the 2013 PEN American Literary Awards are some past visitors to the New York State Writers Institute, including Kevin Young (PEN Open Book Award for The Grey Album), and Marilyn Hacker (PEN/Heim Translation Award for The Bridges of Budapest by Jean-Paul de Dadelson). Jill Lepore was runner-up for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for The Story of America: Essays on Origins.
Complete list of winners: http://www.pen.org/blog/announcing-2013-pen-literary-award-winners
Thursday, October 25, 2012
The Literature of Bullying-- Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, and Catharsis
Gomez will participate in two events on Friday:
Conversations with Diasporican Writers — 2:15 – 3:45 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown CampusModerator: Tomás Urayoán Noel, University at Albany
Guest Writers: Magdalena Gómez, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, and Edwin Torres
Diasporican Café: Performing Voices of the Puerto Rican Diaspora — 5:30 – 7:45 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
Guest Writers: Giannina Braschi, Magdalena Gómez, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, and Edwin Torres
Five internationally known U.S. Puerto Rican writer-performers will discuss their work in an afternoon panel discussion and present readings/performances in the evening. Both events are part of the 20th Anniversary Conference of the Puerto Rican Studies Association, which is being held at UAlbany October 24 – 27. For more information on the Conference go to: http://www.puertoricanstudies.org. Read More......
Monday, July 2, 2012
Tonight in Saratoga: Liz Benedict and Phillip Lopate
The Summer Writers Institute reading series at Skidmore begins tonight with a dual reading by Elizabeth Benedict (pictured here) and Phillip Lopate at 8PM in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs. All events in the series are free and open to the general public."Phillip Lopate is considered by many to be one of the most important essayists of our time, a writer and editor at the fulcrum of memoir's resurgence who has contributed significantly to discourse on creative nonfiction. The anthology Lopate edited in 1994, The Art of the Personal Essay (Doubleday), helped contextualize the genre as part of a global tradition dating back to the classical period." (Poets & Writers, May 2008).
Benedict's novels have established her reputation as a writer who "specializes in the subterranean currents of modern relationships, the secret motivations and betrayals that underlie everyday interactions." Hallie Ephron in the Boston Globe called her most recent novel, The Practice of Deceit, "a wickedly funny literary suspense novel" that is "wry, at times heartbreaking, always smart and entertaining."Newsday's reviewer said that Benedict's "wit is as sharp as her eye, and twice as fast. She writes the hard, horrifying truth about human nature, and it is addictively entertaining." Fresh Air's Maureen Corrigan chose her previous novel, the bestseller Almost, as one of her top five novels of 2001. Read More......
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Bob Boyers Wins Sidney Award
NYS Summer Writers Institute Director Robert Boyers receives a Sidney Award for one of the "Best Essays of 2011" from New York Times columnist David Brooks for an essay about the peculiar physical magnetism of his late friend, the writer and "ladies' man" Charles Newman (pictured here), who died in 2006. The essay appeared in the online literary magazine, AGNI.
"The most beautiful man I ever knew was Charles Newman, the founding editor of the journal TriQuarterly, a gifted novelist and man of letters. When I met him in the late 1970s he was almost forty, the possessor of a large, intelligent, perfectly ordered face in which there was no discernible trace of turbulent emotion. His hair lifted softly above an unruffled forehead, and though, as I later learned, he had recently been through a period of stress and agitation, his eyes were radiant with competence, unencumbered. What might have been taken for indifference in another countenance in his was clearly the conviction of a sumptuous sufficiency. His beauty was carried lightly, as if he had never known the need to tend or promote it.... More
For the Times obituary, click here.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Is Life Possible?
Physicist and author Alan Lightman (who kicks off the Visiting Writers Series on February 2) contributes an essay to the December 21st issue of Harper's about the burgeoning interest among physicists in the "multiverse theory," the theory that there are an incalculable number of universes.
He also addresses the mathematical impossibility of the fact that life exists, the rejection of intelligent design by the scientific community, and the possible explanation provided by multiverses. The more universes, the more likely that a mathematical fluke like life can come to be "by accident." Click to read the essay.
Lightman's essay received a 2011 Sidney Award bestowed by New York Times columnist David Brooks for the year's best American magazine essays.
Lightman will talk about his new novel, Mr. g: A Novel About the Creation, a playful exploration of the "grand ideas" of cosmological physics and the Creation stories of human religion.
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