Alison Lurie's new book in the Wall St. Journal

The Language of Houses by Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and reigning NYS Author Alison Lurie (who visits us on Thurs. 9/18) is reviewed in the Wall St. Journal:

Le Corbusier may have decreed that the house should be "a machine for living," but Alison Lurie knows architecture carries a far greater moral charge than such minimalist efficiency implies. In "The Language of Houses," she takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the social and psychological significance of private and public structures: schools, churches, government buildings, museums, prisons, hospitals, hotels, restaurants and of course homes. She makes a powerful argument that how we choose to order the space we live and work in reveals far more about us, our place in the world and our preoccupations than we know. Architectural design is both a mirror and molder of human experience.... The Language of Houses is a mine of adroit observation, uncovering apparently humdrum details to reveal their unexpected, and occasionally poignant, human meaning.

More in the Wall St. Journal:  http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-language-of-houses-by-alison-lurie-1409345436

More about Lurie's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lurie_alison14.html

More on the upcoming Visiting Writers Series:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html

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Alison Lurie in National Geographic

Acclaimed novelist Alison Lurie, who opens our Fall 2014 Visiting Writers Series, is interviewed in the August 17 issue of  National Geographic:

Acclaimed Novelist Alison Lurie Thinks Buildings Say a Whole Lot About Us

Your house can tell others whether you’re happy or well organized or friendly—even what your politics are.

A critic once remarked that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alison Lurie writes so simply that a cat or a dog can understand her. It was meant as a compliment and taken as such. In her new book she turns her lucid gaze on a subject baffling to many of us: architecture.

In this candid interview she talks about what buildings tell us about their owners' aspirations and politics, why she built houses for fairies as a child, how she feels about being compared to Balzac and Jane Austen, and what her own home in upstate New York reveals about her.

More in National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/08/140817-alison-lurie-architecture-cornell-spoils-of-poynton-great-expectations-booktalk/

More about Alison Lurie's events in Albany:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lurie_alison14.html

More about the Fall 2014 Visiting Writers Series:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#lurie

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Alison Lurie on the Magic of Knitting in the New Yorker

Alison Lurie, New York State Author (2012-14) by appointment of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, under the auspices of the NYS Writers Institute, contributes a piece on knitting to the New Yorker blog:

"As a child, I thought of knitting as a kind of magic, in which a one-dimensional object became two-dimensional or even three-dimensional. While you watched, a very long piece of string somehow turned into a hat or a sock or a mitten, something with shape and weight, an inside and an outside. Appropriately, this transformation was accomplished with long shiny sticks, like the magic wands in fairy tales. "

"It wasn’t only the materials that, for me, were transformed. The people who could perform this magic seemed, in everyday life, to be everyday humans. But when they picked up their wands they turned into sorceresses or fairy godmothers, mistresses of a secret art."

More in the New Yorker:   http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/08/history-of-knitting-in-literature-sweater-curse.html

More on Alison Lurie:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lurie_alison12.html

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Our New Alison Lurie Page

Visit our new page for Alison Lurie, who will visit us on Thursday, September 20th to be inaugurated as New York's newest "Author Laureate," serving as New York State Author 2012-14 by executive order of Andrew Cuomo under the aegis of the New York State Writers Institute.

"Alison Lurie, is celebrated for witty and satirical novels that examine middle class American life, particularly in small northeastern college towns inspired by Ithaca, New York (where she has lived since 1961), and on the campuses of colleges inspired by Cornell University (where she taught from 1968 until her retirement as the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of American Literature in 1998)."

"For her nuanced understanding and lifelike portrayal of social customs and the relationships between the sexes, Lurie is widely regarded as the Jane Austen of contemporary American letters. Over the course of ten novels and half a century she has held a mirror up to people of her own generation as they navigate their lives."   More.

Picture from The Guardian.

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