The Woman Upstairs on multiple "Best Books" lists

Claire Messud's novel The Woman Upstairs, about a woman who lives on the fringes of other people's achievements, was featured on several Best Books of 2013 lists, including those appearing in The Guardian, Washington Post, and The Irish Independent.

From the Guardian: "Original and daring is Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs (Virago), an extraordinarily brilliant book, fizzing with anger and wit...."

Messud visited the Writers Institute in 2006 and 1999.

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

Read More......

Angry, female and refreshingly believable-- Claire Messud

Claire Messud, who talks with you about her work tomorrow, July 11, in Saratoga, is the author most recently of The Woman Upstairs (2013).

 

Elizabeth Day, writing in the London Observer, says "Claire Messud's latest narrator is angry, female and refreshingly believable.... It's difficult to think of any great novel by a woman that has at its heart an unapologetically furious female narrator who is not insane, thwarted or clinically depressed.... the real achievement of this novel is to imbue every chapter with thought-provoking questions surrounding the place of women in literature, society and – most importantly – their own minds. Female anger has never been so readable."

More of the review:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/25/woman-upstairs-claire-messud-review

Full schedule of free readings:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/sumread.html

Read More......

Alison Lurie: The day I threw away fashion

Alison Lurie, Pulitzer-winning novelist, will be inaugurated as NYS Author on 9/20 at Page Hall. A scholar of fashion and avid clothes shopper, Lurie tells The Guardian about abandoning fashion at the age of 60 when fashion abandoned her.

The day I threw away fashion

When she hit 60 Alison Lurie realised that fashion no longer spoke to her. So she got rid of half her wardrobe, stopped colouring her hair, gave up wearing makeup - and felt euphoric

 

Soon after I reached 60 I was abandoned by Vogue magazine and all its clones. Like former lovers who drop you slowly and politely because they once cared for you, they gradually stopped speaking to me. Without intending it I had permanently alienated them, simply by becoming old. From their point of view, I was now a hopeless case. They were not going to show me any more pictures of clothes I might look good in, or give me useful advice about makeup or hair.   More.

Read More......

Celebrating Walter Benjamin at UAlbany

The University at Albany will host an international conference Sept. 28-29 on the work of the beloved literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), a German Jew who attempted to flee the Nazi regime, but committed suicide on the French-Spanish border after being apprehended by the Vichy authorities.

Wildly popular in intellectual circles after his death, Benjamin is famously uncharacterizable as a thinker and writer.

Turkish novelist Elif Shafak makes an effort to describe him (and to describe his importance to her) in an article in The Guardian last April:

"One doesn't read him to feel better. One reads him to feel. In his universe nothing is as it appears to be and there is a vital need to go beyond surfaces and connect with humanity. To live is to walk upon a pile of rubble, listening to any signs of life coming from under the ruins."

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/27/hero-walter-benjamin-elif-shafak

The opening event of the conference is free, open and designed for the general public:  a presentation by quirky novelist and electronic literary artist Paul La Farge, sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute.

Read More......

Top Ten Novels of Solitude

In her "Reckonings" column in Metroland, Jo Page meditates on the shortage of women novelists listed in Teju Cole's "Top Ten Novels of Solitude," which appeared in the Guardian in August 2011.

"It seems to me there are few novels in which women might opt for a kind of voluntary isolation similar to the Invisible Man or the Underground Man. Instead it is far more common for female protagonists to struggle to find their place amidst a obstacle course of social mores—Jane in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is as restricted in her choices as Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, is as Jean Rhys portrays her in Wide Sargasso Sea." More.

Page will visit on 3/20. Cole visited on 2/10.

Institute visitors who appear on Cole's list include Writers Institute Fellow Lydia Davis at #5, Colm Toibin at #9 and Kazuo Ishiguro at #10.

Read More......