NY Times Book Critics' Top Ten Lists of 2014

Six books by past visitors to UAlbany, under the sponsorship of the New York State Writers Institute, appear on the new top ten lists of New York Times book critics Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin and Dwight Garner.

They include Country Girl by Edna O'Brien, The Innovators by Walter Isaacson, Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart, The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, Lila by Marilynne Robinson, and All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu.

Picture:  Edna O'Brien.

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Harry Rosenfeld's Memoir Wins Award

Times Union editor-at-large Harry Rosenfeld has won a 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award, or IPPY, for his book, "From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaperman."

It is the latest in a recent string of honors for Rosenfeld, 84, of Albany, the son of a Polish-born Jewish furrier. Rosenfeld grew up in Berlin and escaped Nazi Germany as a young boy along with his parents and older sister, and emigrated to America in 1939.

The book details Rosenfeld's formative years in the Bronx as a German refugee, his drive to learn English and landing his first job in newspapers as a teenaged shipping clerk at the New York Herald Tribune, where he eventually rose up the editing ranks.

Rosenfeld also describes in depth his role as Metro Editor of the Washington Post during its Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Watergate scandal led by the dogged work of Rosenfeld's reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

More from Paul Grondahl in the Times Union:   http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Newspaperman-s-memoir-wins-award-5504423.php

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Lessons Learned from Pain: Akhil Sharma

 

Susan Comninos interviews Akhil Sharma (who visits today) in the Times Union:

"Indeed, if Family Life is read as nonfiction ("Almost everything in the novel is true," Sharma's been quoted as saying), it might be considered a parenting guide on how not to cope. Viewed as a novel, however, it's both a tragicomic and ultimately accepting immigrant's tale."

More in the Times Union:  http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Lessons-learned-from-pain-5410864.php

More about Sharma's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#sharma

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Akhil Sharma in the NY Times Book Review

Here's a review of Akhil Sharma's new novel, Family Life from the front page of the New York Times Book Review.

“Where is Ajay? What was the point of having raised him?” an elderly woman grumbles to her husband about their adult son in the opening pages of Akhil Sharma’s semi-autobiographical new novel, “Family Life.” This book, deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender at its core, charts the young life of Ajay Mishra as he struggles to grow within a family shattered by loss and disoriented by a recent move from India to America. “Family Life” is equally the story of Ajay’s parents, whose response to grief renders them unable to find the space in which to cherish and raise him.

More in the Times:   http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/books/review/akhil-sharmas-family-life.html?_r=0

Sharma visits the Writers Institute this coming Tuesday, April 22nd:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/sharma_akhil14.html

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Jamaica Kincaid and Writers Institute in NYT

The New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore is mentioned in a New York Times profile of Jamaica Kincaid-- though not by name!

"When Ms. Kincaid read from the book last summer at a writers’ institute at Skidmore College, the mostly student audience peppered her with questions about 'whether the novel is a suitable vehicle for working through the personal this or that,' said Robert Boyers, the director of the institute."

Read more in the Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/books/jamaica-kincaid-isnt-writing-about-her-life-she-says.html?src=recg

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The Work of a Single Sentence: Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid, who reads tonight in Saratoga, discusses the work of thought behind the single 11-word sentence that begins her novel about her biological father, Mr. Potter, a taxi driver on the island of Antigua, whom she first met as an adult.

From the New York Times, June 7, 1999:

"How do I write? Why do I write? What do I write? This is what I am writing: I am writing "Mr. Potter." It begins in this way; this is its first sentence: "Mr. Potter was my father, my father's name was Mr. Potter." So much went into that one sentence; much happened before I settled on those 11 words."  More.

Picture: Jamaica Kincaid with William Kennedy.

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Darin Strauss, Who Writes of Accidentally Killing a Classmate

"Half my life ago, I killed a girl."

So writes memoirist Darin Strauss (who reads tonight, Monday, 7/23, in Saratoga).

In his 2010 memoir, Half a Life, writer Darin Strauss recounts a tragedy and its aftermath. In his last month of high school, just after turning eighteen, Strauss is behind the wheel of his father's Oldsmobile, driving with friends—having "thoughts of mini-golf, another thought of maybe just going to the beach." Then out of the blue: a collision that results in the death of a bicycling classmate that shadows the rest of his life. In spare and piercing prose, Darin Strauss explores loss and guilt, maturity and accountability, hope and acceptance....

"staggering and unforgettable." --Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

Strauss, who received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, will share the stage with award-winning novelist Binnie Kirshenbaum, tonight, Monday, July 23rd, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

 

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