Judaic Studies Annual Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) Lecture
Anne Frank: From Diary to Book
Monday, April 28, 7PM, Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus
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Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Friday, January 31, 2014
A Serial Killer in Albany
More about the events: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/mosley_bailey14.html
Here's the Booklist review: "In 2019, a serial killer is on the loose in Albany, New York. Two women in their twenties have been murdered by having phenol injected into their hearts, and when Broadway actress Vivian Jessup, known as the Red Queen for her role in Alice in Wonderland, is killed in the same manner, Albany PD detective Hannah McCabe and partner Mike Baxter struggle to connect the dots in what has become an even higher-profile case. In the near future, everyone has an ORB (smartphone successor?), a drug named Lullaby can erase memories of crime victims (but causes a problem when used by a witness), and a threader (blogger successor?) with inside knowledge plagues the police. What has not changed is that crime solving requires hard work and good instincts. McCabe shows she has what it takes to succeed at her work and to win readers. University of Albany criminal justice professor Bailey, author of the Lizzie Stuart mysteries, leaves some intriguing questions unanswered in this strong start to a projected series." Read More......
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Ayana Mathis Tonight
Here's an interview in the Times Union:
Q: Your first book was chosen for Oprah's Book Club. What has that done in terms of sales and also any pressure you may feel about your next book?
A: Certainly, the book has reached more folks than it would have otherwise. We make distinctions, which are both useful and harmful, about fiction, and sometimes readers are intimidated by classifications like literary fiction. I think we also have a tendency to label books — as an African-American story or Latino story or gay story, etc. — which results in readers thinking that perhaps a book won't resonate with them, because of whatever differences they perceive between their lives and the characters' lives. This isn't true, of course. Literature reaches across all of those kinds of false barriers.
The Oprah book club's greatest strength is that it makes a great variety of books accessible to people who may not otherwise have found them or been attracted to them. It's as though she's walking the books she chooses into living rooms and book clubs across the country, and people are a bit more willing to take a chance on them. Of course, that translates into sales, but I think the real boon has more to do with readers finding their way to books that are meaningful to them.
More: http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Tribal-initiation-5022008.php
More about Mathis's visit today to UAlbany: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#ayana
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Devil in the Grove to be a Major Motion Picture
Devil in the Grove, by Gilbert King (who visits Albany today), will be a Hollywood film from Lionsgate studios, which reportedly sees the film as a high priority.
Adam Cooper and Bill Collage, the co-writers of Ridley Scott's forthcoming biblical epic, Exodus, will write the script. Allison Shearmur, who produced The Hunger Games, is producing.
Read more in Deadline Hollywood: http://www.deadline.com/2013/06/lionsgate-acquires-pulitzer-prize-winner-devil-in-the-grove-seminal-civil-rights-case-for-thurgood-marshall/
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
National Book Award Longlist for Nonfiction Announced
Gretel Ehrlich, who visited the Writers Institute this past March, and Jill Lepore, who came in 2005, are among the finalists for the National Book Award in nonfiction.
Full list here: http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2013.html
Ehrlich received the nomination for Facing the Wave (2013), a book that she presented here at the Institute. The book is an account of Ehlich's travels in Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and the subsequent meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. A student of Japanese poetry for much of her life, Ehrlich felt compelled to return to Japan to bear witness and record the stories of survivors.
More about Ehrlich (with video of her Albany visit): http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/ehrlich_gretel13.html
Jill Lepore visited in September 2005 to discuss her book about a slave uprising in colonial Manhattan, New York Burning. Her new book is Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, about the personal ordeals of Benjamin Franklin's unschooled sister.
More about Lepore's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lepore_jill.html
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
National Book Award Poetry Longlist Announced
Three past visitors to the NYS Writers Institute appear on the National Book Award's longlist for the award in poetry.
They include Lucie Brock-Broido, for Stay, Illusion; Andrei Codrescu for So Recently Rent a World, New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012; and Frank Bidart for Metaphysical Dog.
See Frank Bidart speak at the Institute on Youtube in 2008:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReSgPXq2W_8
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
A Nobel Prize for One of Ours?
The most noteworthy at the moment is Paul Auster (100:1 odds), who shares the stage on Friday with actual Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee. Link here.
Ladbrokes gives the following authors among our visitors a 16:1 chance: Philip Roth, Amos Oz and Margaret Atwood.
At 20:1, we have Les Murray and Chinua Achebe.
At 33:1, Adam Zagajewski, Don DeLillo, Nurrudin Farah, Joyce Carol Oates and New York State Author E. L. Doctorow.
At 50:1, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chang-Rae Lee, Peter Carey, Bei Dao, Ernesto Cardenal and
| A. B. Yehoshua. At 66:1, Kazuo Ishiguro, Colm Toibin, William Gass, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Julian Barnes and New York State Poet John Ashbery. At 100:1, in addition to Auster, Michael Ondaatje, New York State Author Mary Gordon, Marge Piercy and Louise Gluck. If you have any nominations of your own, feel free to post! |
Friday, December 9, 2011
Hello Chatter, My Old Friend
Our friend Maureen Dowd invokes Virginia Woolf and philosopher Max Picard in her discussion of the pleasures of silence and her review of the new silent film, The Artist, by French writer and director Michel Hazanavicius.
"As far back as half-a-century ago, the Swiss philosopher Max Picard warned: 'Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence,' once as natural as the sky and air.
As fiendish little gadgets conspire to track our movements and record our activities wherever we go, producing a barrage of pictures of everything we’re doing and saying, our lives will unroll as one long instant replay.
There will be fewer and fewer of what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” intense sensations that stand apart from the 'cotton wool of daily life.'"
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Wayne Koestenbaum on Alec Baldwin's Humiliation
In an eerie coincidence, Wayne Koestenbaum talked extensively on the Bat Segundo show, Monday Dec. 5, about Alec Baldwin's public humiliations one day before Baldwin was kicked off an American Airlines flight on Tuesday Dec. 6.
Koestenbaum visited the Institute on October 20 to talk about his new book, Humiliation (2011).
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