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

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Jayne Anne Phillips Event Press Release

JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS, MAJOR AMERICAN FICTION WRITER, AUTHOR OF FICTION ROOTED IN HER WEST VIRGINIA GIRLHOOD, TO OPEN THE WRITERS INSTITUTE’S SPRING SERIES JANUARY 27, 2009

CALENDAR LISTING:
Jayne Anne Phillips, major American novelist and short story writer, author of fiction rooted in her West Virginia girlhood, will discuss her work on Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 8:00 p.m. in the Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. Earlier that same day at 4:15 p.m. the author will present an informal seminar in Assembly Hall, Campus Center, on the uptown campus. The events are sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute and are free and open to the public.

Albany, NY – Jayne Anne Phillips, author of fiction rooted in her West Virginia girlhood, “stepped out of the ranks of her generation as one of its most gifted writers,” averred Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, adding that “Her quick, piercing tales of love and loss [show] a keen love of language, and a rare talent of illuminating the secret core of ordinary lives with clearsighted unsentimentality.”

Phillips is the author most recently of Lark and Termite (2009), a novel about the members of a West Virginia family struggling to survive during the 1950s at the time of the Korean War. The characters include Lark, a teenage girl forced by circumstances to assume the responsibilities of womanhood, and Termite, her profoundly disabled younger brother who, despite his impairments, enjoys a vivid inner life. The novel also follows the experiences of Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, amid the carnage and turmoil on the Korean peninsula.

In advance praise, novelist Junot Díaz called the new book, “extraordinary… luminous… It is an astounding feat of the imagination… the best novel I've read this year.” Alice Munro said, “This novel is cut like a diamond, with such sharp authenticity and bursts of light.” “New York Times” reviewer Michiko Kakutani called the novel “intricate” and “deeply felt” and described the characters as “so indelible, so intimately drawn, that they threaten to move in and take up permanent residence in the reader’s mind.”

Phillips’ earlier books include the short story collection “Black Tickets” (1979), and the novels “Machine Dreams” (1984), “Shelter” (1994) and “MotherKind” (2000).

Phillips’ first novel, “Machine Dreams,” tells the story of how a West Virginia family weathers the major events of the 20th century, from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War. Novelist Robert Stone said, “‘Machine Dreams’, in its wisdom and its compassionate, utterly unsentimental rendering of the American condition, will rank as one of the great books of [the] decade.”

“MotherKind” explores the spiritual education of a woman who must become the caretaker of her terminally ill mother during the early months of a young marriage and after the birth of her first child. The “Time” magazine reviewer said, “A passionate but indirect evocation of loss . . . Phillips concentrates on the day-to-day details of ordinary existence suddenly afflicted with extraordinary pressures and the conflicting tugs of joy and grief.”

Jayne Anne Phillips is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Bunting Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and both the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.
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Jayne Anne Phillips pays homage to The Sound and the Fury

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
--William Shakespeare, “Macbeth,” Act V, Scene v

Jayne Anne Phillips pays homage to fellow Southerner William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in her remarkable new novel, Lark and Termite (January 2009), the story of a West Virginia family struggling to survive at the time of the Korean War. Both novels feature four points of view, stream-of-consciousness narratives, and mentally impaired characters with special gifts of vision and understanding.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Lorraine Adams said, “Phillips reinvigorates and transforms the Faulknerian infrastructure. Female voices, not the chorus of brothers Jason and Quentin, dominate in Lark and Termite…. While Faulkner chronicled the decay of the South through its men, Phillips adumbrates the nobility of Appalachia, of Korean refugees, of the least of us, by taking us into the “shaky territory” of women….”

Note: Fiction writer Jayne Anne Phillips will visit the Writers Institute on Tuesday, January 27, 2009. She will hold an informal workshop at 4:15 PM in Assembly Hall, Campus Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus, 1400 Washington Ave. In the evening, at 8 PM, Phillips will read from and discuss her new novel Lark and Termite in the Recital Hall of the Performing Arts Center on the uptown campus.

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Spring 2009 Visiting Writers Series to feature Jayne Anne Phillips, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Alex Gibney

The Spring 2009 Visiting Writers series will feature an exciting line-up of writers distinguished in a variety of fields, including fiction, poetry, history, science writing, literary criticism, drama and screenwriting. Details will be announced shortly.

Here’s a glimpse of what you can look forward to in the coming months….

Jayne Anne Phillips, author of fiction rooted in her West Virginia girlhood, has been called one of the most gifted writers of her generation (Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times). Phillips is the author most recently of Lark and Termite (2009), a novel about the members of a West Virginia family struggling to survive during the 1950s at the time of the Korean War. The characters include Lark, a teenage girl forced by circumstances to assume the responsibilities of womanhood, and Termite, her profoundly disabled younger brother who, despite his impairments, enjoys an intricate inner life. In advance praise, novelist Junot Díaz called it, “extraordinary… luminous… It is an astounding feat of the imagination… the best novel I've read this year.” Alice Munro said, “This novel is cut like a diamond, with such sharp authenticity and bursts of light.” Phillips’ earlier books include Black Tickets (1979), Machine Dreams (1984), Shelter (1994) and MotherKind (2000).

Annette Gordon-Reed has been called, “one of the most astute, insightful, and forthright historians of this generation” (Edmund Morgan, The New York Review of Books). A Professor of History at Rutgers and Professor of Law at New York Law School, Gordon-Reed is the author of The Hemingses of Monticello (2008), winner of the 2008 National Book Award. The new book tells the story of multiple generations of Thomas Jefferson’s secret slave family. Earlier works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), which Jill Lepore called, “[A] tour de force. . . . a devastating brief on standards of evidence in historical research.” Gordon-Reed also coauthored Vernon Can Read! (2001), the autobiography of civil rights leader and Clinton confidant, Vernon Jordan.

Alex Gibney Documentary Film Series
We will host a visit by Alex Gibney, major documentary film director, in association with a screening of three of his major films: Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008), a finalist for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance; Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), which received the Academy Award for Best Documentary; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), which was nominated for the same Academy Award. Gibney also directed The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002), and is currently at work on Freakonomics (2009), based on the bestseller by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Gibney served as executive producer for the Iraqi war documentary No End in Sight (2007), an Academy Award contender, and served as series producer under Martin Scorcese for the 2003 PBS series “The Blues.”

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Jayne Anne Phillips: “Teaching Shoots Writing in the Head”

Many writers confess to a love-hate relationship with teaching, a near-polar ambivalence. On the one hand, teaching appears to occupy—in a total, exclusive, and painfully distracting fashion— a part of the brain that is necessary for writing. On the other hand, teaching is a deeply satisfying and rewarding activity, one that keeps not only the writer, but also civilization itself, alive.

Jayne Anne Phillips, a beloved teacher and writer-in-residence at Boston and Brandeis Universities for many years, had this to say about the pressures of teaching in a 1998 essay that appears in the collection Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (1998), edited by Will Blythe:

“[T]eaching shoots writing in the head. Sometimes the writer lives on afterward, blinking to say what he wants. But it's like when you stop smoking: the writer quits teaching, and the lungs pick up in ten weeks, the brain relearns its functions. The writer is an autonomic nervous system, a heart that won't stop pumping.”

Ten years later she has succeeded in striking an impressive balance between competing professions. The architect of a newly-created creative writing program at Rutgers Newark that The Atlantic calls, “one of the most exciting in the country,” Phillips has also completed— despite the demands of her first full year as director of the program— a major new novel, Lark and Termite (January 2009).

Note: Fiction writer Jayne Anne Phillips will visit the Writers Institute on Tuesday, January 27, 2009. She will hold an informal workshop at 4:15 PM in Assembly Hall, Campus Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus, 1400 Washington Ave. In the evening, at 8 PM, Phillips will read from and discuss her new novel Lark and Termite in the Recital Hall of the Performing Arts Center on the uptown campus.

Read More......