Christa Parravani of Guilderland, Acclaimed Memoir

New author Christa Parravani, who graduated from Guilderland High School and spent parts of her childhood in Albany and Schenectady will present her first book, Her, a highly acclaimed memoir about the life and death of her twin sister, Cara Parravani, at UAlbany, Thursday, March 7.

Novelist Jayne Anne Phillips said, “Christa Parravani’s lyrical, no-nonsense Her ranks with the best American memoirs of the decade… an uncompromising love poem to the joys and dangers of shared identity, and an unforgettable treatise on addiction, trauma, survival, and triumph.” Author Nick Flynn called it, “reckless yet delicate, familiar yet otherworldly, precise yet with the soul of a fairytale, and deeply moving in surprising ways.” Novelist Julie Orringer said, “With a photographer’s sharp eye and a gifted writer’s penetrating insight, Parravani writes about being torn apart and then about piecing her life back together, brilliantly illuminating along the way what it means to be a sister, a daughter, a wife, an artist, and— ultimately, and triumphantly— herself.”

More about her visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/parravani_christa13.html

Read More......

Thrillingly unfashionable!

Reviewers have been heaping praise on Julie Orringer's old-fashioned realism in The Invisible Bridge. (Orringer visits February 10).

Here's Lucas Wittmann who chose Orringer to launch a new series in The Daily Beast highlighting "the best new writers in America": "There is something thrillingly unfashionable about Orringer’s novel, with its 19th-century themes and its unavoidable truth that history has an unfailing hold on us all."

Similarly, Sara Lippmann of the Washington D.C. PBS station WETA's "Book Studio": "Staunchly traditional, nearly Russian in its breadth, The Invisible Bridge shrugs off modern conventions like irony in favor of sensory details and richly-rendered settings, careful plotting, exquisite prose and a clear message about the horrors of war....

Writing in the Chicago Tribune, former literary editor of The Nation, says, “Haunting. . . . [The Invisible Bridge] exhibits wonderfully evoked realism. . . . A literary throwback of sorts, a fat facsimile of a nineteenth-century novel, the kind of story that critics would faintly praise as ‘sweeping’ (commonly meaning they write it off in other respects) were the author not so obviously endowed with talent, and the novel’s particularities so vibrant.”

Read More......