Robert Coover's Rollicking Tale, Scathing Satire 1/31

We kick off an exciting Spring 2017 season with major American author Robert Coover who will present Huck Out West. The book is a rollicking adventure tale, an homage to Twain, and-- at the same time-- a scathing satire of American racism, greed and brutality.

January 31 (Tuesday): Robert Coover, award-winning fiction writer

Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center

Reading — 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center

Robert Coover, pioneer of experimental and electronic fiction, is celebrated for work that reinvents and reimagines the art of storytelling. The New York Times has called him “a one-man Big Bang of exploding creative force.”. His new novel, Huck Out West (2017), picks up where Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn leaves off – on the eve of the Civil War. In a starred review Booklist described the book as “a near-masterpiece…a surprisingly tender, touching paean to the power of storytelling and the pains of growing up.”

Cosponsored by UAlbany’s English Department to inaugurate its new Creative Writing minor

Following Huck west as he rides shotgun with the Pony Express, mines for gold, and lives with the Lakota, the novel explores a formative period in American history, from the Civil War to the

centennial year of 1876. In the West, it’s a time of grand adventure, but also one of greed, religious insanity, mass slaughter, virulent hatreds, widespread poverty and ignorance, ruthless military and civilian leadership, and huge disparities of wealth.

For more information about the upcoming Spring Series, visit http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html  or call 518 442 5620.

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A Theory of Humor

Providing a glimpse into the mysteries of the American mind for British readers, George Saunders wrote a column entitled "American Psyche" for the Guardian, 2004-8.

Here is a piece on humor from June 2008:

"Let's attempt to derive a theory of humour. Enabled by our theory, everyone could be funny, not just people who are actually funny. And since being funny is an asset - in business, in romance, when one has broken the law - it's hardly fair that "funny people" enjoy a monopoly.

"Let's begin with animals. Which animals are funny? Not an eagle. Unless the eagle is wearing a top hat. And walking stiffly through a supermarket, muttering grumpily to itself about how the world used to be a better place. The addition of a top hat makes any animal funnier. Put a top hat on an already funny animal (a pig, say), and the effect is hilarious, especially if the pig topples over for no reason and can't get up. And the eagle in the top hat stiffly steps over the fallen pig, muttering further reactionary platitudes. Then the pig puts out one of its stumpy pink legs, and down goes the eagle.

More in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/jun/21/healthandwellbeing.americanpsyche

Saunders visits UAlbany today: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/saunders_george13.html

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The Aching Banality of Our Times-- George Saunders

"Short story master George Saunders is fascinated by one of the great stories of the modern age — and it’s not climate change, not the world at war. Rather: It is the aching banality of our times. The pervasive McCulture. And how it robs us of our humanity, contorts our moral bearings, separates us from true feeling."

"In fiction and his essays, Saunders examines the ways in which the forces of corporate capitalism — and our own material urges — numb us, dumb us and humiliate us. He commands us to take a hard look at the absurd logic-language of Group Think or Management Speak. Then, in the spirit of communal recognition, he invites us to laugh out loud at it."

Read more by Brad Buchholz in the Austin American-Statesman:  http://www.statesman.com/news/entertainment/books-literature/humor-and-hurting/nTs4c/

Saunders visits UAlbany today:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/saunders_george13.html

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Best "School Book"

The New York Times asked its staffers to pick their favorite book ever about school settings.

Janet Maslin picked The War Between the Tates by the Writers Institute's newly-appointed New York State Author Alison Lurie.

“The War Between the Tates” is Alison Lurie’s funniest and most sharp-clawed novel. Published in 1974, and describing the step-by-step breakdown of a marriage between two academics, it is set at a place that’s called Corinth University but is instantly recognizable as Cornell. This book’s satirical bite is so sharp that when the Cornell Chronicle ran a piece about Lurie in 1998, the English department chair half-joked that “we professorial types worry that we might be satirized in a sequel” and expressed “gratitude” that her subsequent books had had other targets. Lurie concentrates on hostilities between Brian Tate, a self-satisfied political science professor, and Erica, his maddeningly stifled wife. At 40, Erica has a Radcliffe degree that has earned her the right to sit through faculty dinners and a husband who expects to be doted on. There are also two Tate teens, described tartly by Ms. Lurie as “nasty, brutish and tall.” The year is 1969. The Tates have hit the age of midlife crisis. It is almost inevitable for Brian to get involved with a student and for Erica to be galvanized by feminism as she fights back. Even with Vietnam War is its backdrop, artfully contrasted with the Tates’ form of combat, Lurie does her best strategic maneuvering on the home front. But it’s the depiction of all things Corinth that makes this tale of fraught academia so timeless and dead-on.

More picks in the NYT.

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Danzy Senna, Author Who Explores Multiracial Experience

Multiracial author Danzy Senna is the daughter of African-American scholar Carl Senna and white author Fanny Howe. Her fiction frequently explores the experience of being biracial, the ambiguity of race, and the absurdity of defining race.

Click here to read an interview last year with the Times Union's Elizabeth Floyd Mair:

"In the liberal white world, what's sometimes hardest for me is the earnestness around race. It doesn't have that quality of irony and humor that I feel when I'm in a group of people who are of color--that ease of humor."

Senna will read today with former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic, Tuesday, July 17th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga.

 

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

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Dear God, I Hated This Book....

Shalom Auslander, who visits today, writes a perverse and (eventually) wholly positive introduction to Chaim Potok's The Chosen. The introduction appears in a wholly imaginary Modern Library edition of Potok's book, and begins this way:

"Dear God, I hated this book. I hated this book more than Shakespeare and I really hated Shakespeare. The only work I hated more than Shakespeare's was the Old Testament, and I hated this book even more than I hated the Old Testament...."  More.

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David Sedaris Reading Shalom Auslander

What book is on your night stand now?


I was a judge for this year’s Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, so until very recently I was reading essays written by clever high school students. Now I’ve started Shalom Auslander’s “Hope: A Tragedy.” His last book, “Foreskin’s Lament,” really made me laugh.

Read more about what Sedaris is reading in the New York Times.

Auslander visits tomorrow, Tuesday, April 24th.

Sedaris visited October 1998.

Picture: Sedaris as Santa's helper for the Santaland Diaries.

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Shalom Auslander: Hating Houseplants

"I’ve never liked houseplants, I don’t know why. They make me angry. I am, however, a man of much irrational hatred, and only realized why houseplants infuriate me so much this past weekend."

Humorist Shalom Auslander, whose events have been rescheduled for this coming Tuesday, April 24th, talks about his complicated relationship with houseplants in the New York Observer.

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Shalom Auslander Rescheduled, Tuesday, April 24

Shalom Auslander, as luck would have it, was prevented from visiting Albany during the year's only snowstorm.

His events have been postponed to Tuesday, April 24th....

April 24 (Tuesday)Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown CampusReading — 8:00 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus

Shalom Auslander, ex-Orthodox Jew, humorist, cultural renegade, and contributor to NPR’s This American Life, received both notoriety and praise for his story collection, Beware of God (2005), and the memoir, Foreskin’s Lament (2007). Hope: A Tragedy (2012), his first novel, tells the story of a troubled man who discovers—living in the attic of his upstate New York home—a decrepit old woman who claims to be Anne Frank. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said, “Cultural anthropologists trying to figure out if there really is a recognizably Jewish voice and sense of humor ... should consider Auslander’s debut novel.”

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Shalom Auslander Rescheduled!

The Auslander events have been rescheduled for Tuesday, April 24.

4:15PM Seminar in the Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus

8PM Reading in the Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus

For a not yet updated page on Auslander, click here.

Auslander's events on 3/1 were cancelled because of snow.

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Let Us Now Praise Satirical Jews

"Let us now praise satirical Jews. It's a noble tradition that includes such luminaries as Groucho Marx, Fran Lebowitz and Jon Stewart, outsiders who mock society with a surgical scalpel of wit to reveal the ridiculous in sharp relief. To that illustrious group some may consider adding writer Shalom Auslander. In his debut collection of short stories, Beware of God, Auslander takes his knife to the pious veneer of modern-day religious Jewish life and makes sport of exposing its underbelly. For the Gen-X and Gen-Y Jews who wear 'Moses Is My Homeboy' T-shirts and read Heeb magazine, a poet laureate may be in the making."

Ruth Andrew Ellison reviewed Shalom Auslander's debut story collection, Beware of God, in the L. A. Times in 2005. Read more.

Auslander visits the Institute tomorrow, Thursday, 3/1.

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Shalom Auslander: Hating His New Car

Shalom Auslander, who visits Thursday 3/1, regrets his purchase of a "carbon-frugal" car in a piece that appeared in The Guardian in 2008:

"I hated my new car. I hated Japan. I wanted a gas-guzzler. I wanted a car with negative miles per gallon. I wanted a Ford F-150. I wanted a Ford F-350. I wanted a Ford F-550, with an extra engine strapped to the top that didn't even attach to anything, it just ran continuously, all day and all night, doing nothing but spreading toxins and poison into the atmosphere of a planet full of people I loathed. I wanted a car that ran on CFCs, and I wanted to drive it across the planet with "Bite me, mankind," written across the back window. And when, a few weeks later, I returned home, all mankind would be gone and I would laugh and laugh and choke and die. Happily."

More.

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Auslander: Touching the Touchiest Subjects

"I knew from reading the jacket copy that Shalom Auslander's debut novel, Hope: A Tragedy, would touch on all sorts of taboos. Indeed, it contains many a joke on topics that are usually way off-limits, including Anne Frank, the Holocaust, and Jesus' last words on the cross. But I had no idea just how intelligent and beautifully written it was also going to be."

So writes Elizabeth Floyd Mair in the Times Union. Read more.

Auslander visits this coming Thursday, March 1st.

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John Hodgman: I Don't Really Have an Attic

Shalom Auslander, who visits Thursday, March 1st, asks fellow humorist John Hodgman to hide him in the event of a second Holocaust in a book trailer for his new novel, Hope: A Tragedy.

Hodgman explains that he doesn't have an attic in his New York City apartment but that he does have three small storage units. Regarding the logistics, he wonders whether Auslander is fond of both his children. See the YouTube video.

Hodgman, who played the uncool PC in Apple's long-running "Get a Mac" advertising campaign, visited the Institute in 2005.

Picture: Hodgman and Justin Long in a "Get a Mac" ad.

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Will You Hide Me?

Anticipating a second Holocaust, Shalom Auslander, who visits on March 1st, asks fellow humorist Sarah Vowell whether she will shelter him and his family in her New York City apartment.

The video is part of a series of book trailers for Auslander's novel, Hope: A Tragedy (2012). The trailers feature a number of Auslander's co-contributors to NPR's This American Life.

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Two Jews Lost in a Holocaust Museum

Alexander Nazaryan of the Daily News gets a first-hand experience of the dark, angry humor of Shalom Auslander (who visits 3/1):

"We were somewhere near the Warsaw Ghetto when Shalom Auslander’s anger started to kick in. He was angry because he had wanted to see pictures of female Israeli soldiers, but there were none on display that day at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan. He was angry because he had not been able to find cigarettes in Battery Park City before coming to meet me there on a cold Wednesday afternoon. He was angry because I kept waving my voice recorder in his face. I pointed out the dangers of misquotation. His small eyes glowed." More.

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A Capricious God

"[Shalom Auslander] is scabrously funny, especially on faith and meaning, but his stories have a habit of breaking down. This is partly because his great subject, God's capriciousness, is a closed loop and as such can be difficult to frame as narrative. 'Pascal's last words were: May God never abandon me,' he observes early in the novel. 'A moment later, God did.' In such a universe, it's not that bad things happen to good people, but that everything that happens is ultimately defined by its own meaninglessness, by the futility of being alive."

Read more of David Ulin's review in the L. A. Times.

Shalom Auslander visits the Writers Institute on March 1st.

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Writing in the Attic

Here's Janet Maslin on Shalom Auslander (who visits March 1st) in Wednesday's New York Times:

"He brings to mind Woody Allen, Joseph Heller and — oxymoron here — a libido-free version of Philip Roth."

More.

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