The NYS Writers Institute announces a
spectacular calendar of free events for the Spring of 2016.
Headliners will include bestselling author and
mountaineer Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild, Into Thin Air); Pulitzer-winning
playwright and UAlbany alum Stephen Adly Guirgis (Between Riverside
and Crazy); pioneering Black female Hollywood director Darnell Martin
(Their Eyes Were Watching God); Pulitzer-winning New York Times business
reporter Charles Duhigg whose previous book The Power of Habit spent
120 weeks on the Times bestseller list; visionary computer scientist who
foresaw the Internet and who teaches computers to write poetry, David
Gelernter; New York Times health reporter Sheri Fink, author
of the major bestseller about Hurricane Katrina, Five Days at Memorial; 2013
Tony Winner for Best Director, Pam MacKinnon (the revival of Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?); major Irish fiction writer Colm Toibin,
author of Brooklyn, the basis of the Oscar-nominated film; local son and
Pulitzer winner Richard Russo with the new novel, Everybody’s
Fool, the sequel to his beloved classic Upstate New York novel, Nobody’s
Fool; and much, much more. Visit the links below for more details.
Mark your calendars for the State Author and Poet inauguration
ceremony on February 11th at 8PM at Page Hall. The new State Author
will be Edmund White, one of America’s finest prose writers, and its
leading chronicler of Gay experience. The new State Poet will be Yusef
Komunyakaa, Pulitzer winner and one of America’s most influential and most
anthologized poets.
In honor of the Pulitzer Centennial (1916-2016),
the series will feature seven Pulitzer winners— if you include William
Kennedy who will present a special program on Old Albany in March.
For more on the Visiting Writers Series,
visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#.Vp5_S01wXs0
For more on the Classic Film Series,
visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#.Vp5_W01wXs0
We
hope to see you soon!
For more information, visit us online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst
or call us at 518-442-5620.
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
NYS Writers Institute Announces Spring 2016 Schedule
Friday, September 25, 2015
Her All-Time Favorite Short Stories-- Ann Beattie
Ann Beattie, who visits this coming Tuesday, shares some of her all-time favorite short stories in a New York Times "By the Book" interview:
Among them: “Twilight of the Superheroes” and “Your Duck Is My Duck,” by Deborah Eisenberg; “Way Down Deep in the Jungle,” by Thom Jones; “Oxygen,” by Ron Carlson; “Nettles” and “The Albanian Virgin,” by Alice Munro; “The Fat Girl,” by Andre Dubus; “We Didn’t,” by Stuart Dybek; “Tits-Up in a Ditch,” by Annie Proulx; “Bruns,” by Norman Rush; “Escapes,” by Joy Williams; “Yours,” by Mary Robison; “The Dog of the Marriage,” by Amy Hempel; “The Fireman’s Wife,” by Richard Bausch; “The Womanizer,” by Richard Ford; “Helping,” by Robert Stone; “No Place for You, My Love,” by Eudora Welty; “Are These Actual Miles,” by Raymond Carver; “People Like That Are The Only People Here,” by Lorrie Moore; “Last Night,” by James Salter; “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story,” by Russell Banks; “Hunters in the Snow,” by Tobias Wolff; Rebecca Lee’s collection, “Bobcat.”
More in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/books/review/ann-beattie-by-the-book.html?ref=books&_r=1
More about Ann Beattie's 2 events with Peg Boyers this Tuesday, 9/29: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/beattie_boyers15.html
Thursday, August 20, 2015
New Fall Series!
The Writers Institute Fall 2015 schedule of events offers
a rich variety of genres, from poetry to science writing to fiction to history
to memoir to filmmaking and theatre. The upcoming series will even include a
food writer—New York Times columnist and bestselling cookbook author
Mark Bittman, whose work has been described by PBS as a “bible of basic cooking
for millions of Americans.”
The series will showcase two extraordinary former
students at UAlbany—journalist Tom Junod, who holds the all-time record for
National Magazine Award nominations (eleven!), and Edward Burns, director,
actor, and one of the most prolific and influential independent filmmakers
currently at work. Burns will present his new memoir, Independent Ed (2015),
about which Matt Lauer of Today said, “Every young, hungry, creative
person should view this as a textbook.... It’s a how-to.”
Other guests will include Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Rachel Grady; young adult novelist Jason Reynolds, winner of the American Library Association's Coretta Scott King Award; major American short story writer Ann Beattie; Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson; bestselling horror novelist Peter Straub; National Book Award finalist Mary Gaitskill; "Best New Documentary Filmmaker" at the Tribeca Film Festival, Sean Dunne; trail-blazing neuroscience writer Casey Schwartz; Vonnegut biographer Ginger Strand; and major American dramatist Tina Howe.
For more on the Visiting Writers Series, visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#.VdXvw1_D_s1
For more on the Classic Film Series, visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#.VdXwQF_D_s0
We hope to see you soon!
Monday, October 6, 2014
Contenders for the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature
Nearly 30% of the leading contenders for the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature (according to British betting giant, Ladbrokes, for what that's worth) have visited Albany under the sponsorship of the New York State Writers Institute.
They include frequent frontrunner Philip Roth; upstate New York native and Summer Writers Institute stalwart Joyce Carol Oates; Polish poet Adam Zagajewski; Chinese poet Bei Dao; Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah (who visited twice); Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood; Bronx novelist Don DeLillo (twice); Israeli novelist Amos Oz; American novelist Richard Ford (twice); Irish poet Paul Muldoon; Australian poet Les Murray; and Irish novelist Colm Toibin.
The Wall St. Journal discusses Ladbrokes' oddsmaking regarding the Nobel Prize in Literature here: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/09/30/bookmakers-weigh-in-on-who-will-win-the-nobel-prize-for-literature/ Read More......
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Edith Grossman
Here is an excerpt from Edith Grossman's speech about translating Marquez at the 2003 PEN Tribute to the late Columbian author (1927-2014) whose work had a transformative impact on global literature:
"Ralph Maheim, the great translator from the German, compared the translator to an actor who speaks as the author would if the author spoke English. A sophisticated and provocative analogy, for it takes into account something that is not always as clear as it should be, at least to many reviewers, whose highest endorsement for a translation tends to be that it is “seamless.” If I may attempt to translate the damnation barely concealed in their faint praise, I think they really mean that the translator has, with proper humility, made herself or himself “invisible,” a punishing goal that is desirable only if we are held personally responsible for the Tower of Babel and all its dire consequences for our species."
Full text here: http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_PEN_grossman.html
More about Grossman's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/grossman_edith14.html
Complete schedule of events: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#.VBBgU1_D_s0
Read More......
Friday, April 18, 2014
Gabriel García Márquez (1927 – 2014)
The New York Times obituary:
Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” would sell tens of millions of copies. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since ‘Don Quixote.’ ” The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”
More in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/books/gabriel-garcia-marquez-literary-pioneer-dies-at-87.html?_r=0
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Julia Glass on Francesca Marciano
Last week's guest, National Book Award winner Julia Glass [pictured here], contributes a praise blurb to this Friday's guest's new story collection, The Other Language:
“I loved every single one of these affecting, suspenseful, and sublimely crafted stories. It’s clear that Francesca Marciano is worldly as well as wise, yet what she’s surprisingly insightful about is the hazardous nature of worldliness itself. Because our modern lives are so mobile, our ways of communicating so refined, we risk coming to believe that the borders defining class, culture, and gender are somehow more permeable. Think again, she tells us in these nine cautionary tales—the best new collection I’ve read in years.” —Julia Glass
Francesca Marciano visits tomorrow:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/marciano_francesca14.html
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Short Essay Contest, Deadline April 15th
You are invited to enter the first New York State “Poetry
Unites” short essay contest.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Treasures from the Archive: Barbara Kingsolver
Major American novelist Barbara Kingsolver visited the Writers Institute in the spring of 1992, and was also interviewed by the late Tom Smith, Institute Director, for the WAMC Book Show, April 16, 1992.
Monday, March 10, 2014
From Africa to America: Dinaw Mengestu
Elizabeth Floyd Mair profiles Dinaw Mengestu (who visits us on Thursday) in the Times Union.
Q: How did the idea for this book come to you? Did you need to do any mapping out in advance of what would happen?
A: I began this novel while finishing my second book. It started off with a simple image/idea — a group of young friends on a college campus somewhere in Africa just after independence. I thought the story would remain there, and since I had no plan, or map for it, I had to work out the rest of the narrative slowly over the several years.
More in the Times Union: http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/From-Africa-to-America-5294425.php
More about Mengestu's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/mengestu_dinaw14.html
Monday, February 24, 2014
"A Highly Original Experiment in Historical Fiction": Doctorow's Ragtime.
In 1975, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times is awed by E. L. Doctorow's novel, Ragtime:
"It works so well that one devours it in a single sitting as if it were the most conventional of entertainments. And the reviewer is tempted to dispense with heavy breathing and analysis and settle down to mindless celebration of the pure fun of the thing.... But Ragtime works--and works so effortlessly that one hesitates to take it apart. Still, the questions persist: How does it work? Why do these historical images--half documentary-half invented--seem truer than the truth? And the answer is, for one obvious thing, they reflect all that is most significant and dramatic in America's last hundred years or so...."
More in the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/08/books/doctorow-ragtime.html?_r=0
Doctorow visits Albany to present his new novel, Andrew's Brain, this coming Thursday, February 27:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/doctorow_el14.html
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Is Twitter a Literary Form?
Recent Institute visitor Teju Cole discusses the limits and possibilities of Twitter as a literary form in the "6th floor blog" of the New York Times:
"When the merits of Twitter are debated, one sentiment invariably is at the top of the con column: 140 characters are seldom enough to express the full weight of an idea. Or at least an idea that’s worth expressing."
"People have found ways around this: conjoined tweets, live-tweeting, etc. … The novelist Teju Cole expanded on this theme on Wednesday, when he posted an entire short story via tweet. Yes, that has been done before. But Cole’s project was different, because the individual tweets were posted not by him, but by his followers, and then @TejuCole retweeted them in chronological order to form a sort of quilted story."
More in the New York Times: http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/teju-cole-puts-story-telling-to-the-twitter-test/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
More about Teju Cole's visit in February 2012: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/cole_teju12.html Read More......
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Goli Taraghi in the Times Union
Susan Comninos interviews Goli Taraghi, major voice in Iranian literature who visits Albany today.
"An intriguing time warp exists in the fiction of Persian expatriate author Goli Taraghi. While many fear rising nuclear capability in today's Iran, Taraghi, 74, remains gripped by her homeland's past. Decades after the 1979 revolution that toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Taraghi, in her new collection of short stories, "The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons" (W.W. Norton, Oct. 23, 2013), continues to chronicle the lives of exiles like herself, who fled to Western countries from the Islamic Republic. For Taraghi, their exodus is a trauma that never ended, but keeps getting painfully re-enacted."
More in the Times Union: http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/Expatriate-author-feels-pull-of-home-4904546.php
More about Goli Taraghi's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/taraghi_goli13.html
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize
STOCKHOLM (AP) - Alice Munro, a Canadian master of the short story revered as a thorough but forgiving chronicler of the human spirit, won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday.
Munro is the first Canadian writer to receive the prestigious $1.2 million award from the Swedish Academy since Saul Bellow, who left for the U.S. as a boy and won in 1976.
Seen as a contemporary Chekhov for her warmth, insight and compassion, she has captured a wide range of lives and personalities without passing judgment on her characters. Unusually for Nobel winners, Munro's work consists almost entirely of short stories. "Lives of Girls and Women" is her only novel.
"I knew I was in the running, yes, but I never thought I would win," the 82-year-old said by telephone when contacted by The Canadian Press in Victoria, British Columbia.
Munro is beloved among her peers, from Lorrie Moore and George Saunders to Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen. She is equally admired by critics. She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's prize, Canada's highest literary honor.
More from the Associated Press: http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_268773/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=BFDTleAC
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Times Union Announces Writers Institute Fall Season
Jonathan Lethem launches New York State Writers Institute season
His latest novel, "Dissident Gardens," is a multigenerational family tale about communists and radicals living in Queens, from the 1930s to the recent Occupy Wall Street movement, and is the biggest canvas Lethem has every worked with. Central to the novel is the tale of two women struggling to follow their dreams: the mercurial Rose, known as the Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, who torments anyone within reach; and her daughter Miriam, who, much to her mother's chagrin, embraces Greenwich Village counterculture.
Read More......
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
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
Friday, August 30, 2013
Labor Day Weekend Reading
Publishers Weekly new "Picks of the Week" include books by two past visitors to the Writers Institute who also happen to be giants of world literature, Margaret Atwood [pictured here] and J. M. Coetzee.
MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday) - The final entry in Atwood’s brilliant MaddAddam trilogy roils with spectacular and furious satire. The novel begins just after most of the human species has been eradicated by a man-made plague. The early books explore a world of terrifying corporate tyranny, horrifying brutality, and the relentless rape of women and the planet. In Oryx and Crake, the pandemic leaves wounded protagonist Jimmy to watch over the Crakers, a humanoid species bioengineered to replace humankind by the man responsible for unleashing the plague. In The Year of the Flood, MaddAddamites wield science to terrorize corporate villains while God’s Gardeners use prayer and devotion to the Earth to prepare for the approaching cataclysm. Toby, a God’s Gardener and key character in the second book, narrates the third installment, in which a few survivors, including MaddAddamites, God’s Gardeners, Jimmy, and the Crakers, navigate a postapocalyptic world.
The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee (Viking) - In this captivating and provocative new novel, a small boy who has been renamed David, and Simón, the man who has become David’s caretaker since David was separated from his mother, have immigrated to a nameless country. Simón soon finds work on the docks, is given an apartment for new arrivals, and sets about the impossible task of finding David’s mother, whose name they do not know and whose face the boy does not remember. Precise, rich, and wonderful.
Atwood's Albany visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/atwood.html
J. M. Coetzee's recent visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/coetzee_auster12.html
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Jonathan Lethem Presents New Novel, 9/11
Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author, to read from his new novel,
Dissident Gardens, September 11, 2013.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel,
Motherless Brooklyn
Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of
the novels Motherless Brooklyn (1999), and The Fortress of
Solitude (2003), will read from and discuss his new novel, Dissident
Gardens (2013), a family saga about three generations of New York City
leftists, on Wednesday, September 11, 2013 at 8 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 the
Standish Room, Science Library, on the uptown campus. The events are free and
open to the public, and are cosponsored by the New York State Writers
Institute.
Jonathan Lethem is a novelist and critic celebrated for his scholarly
interest in American pop culture, and for novels that blend a variety of
genres, including comic books, detective fiction, and science fiction. He
received the National Book Critics Circle Award for his bestselling novel Motherless
Brooklyn (1999), the story of a detective with Tourette's Syndrome.
In 1999, Lethem was the only novelist listed among Newsweek's
"100 People for the New Century." He received a MacArthur Foundation
Fellowship in 2005.
Dissident Gardens is the story of three generations of
American radicals living in Sunnyside, Queens, and Greenwich Village, as they
take part in the home-grown Communism of the 1930s up through the Occupy Wall
Street movement of more recent days. The Kirkus reviewer said, "A
dysfunctional family embodies a dysfunctional epoch, as the novelist continues
his ambitious journey through decades, generations and the boroughs of New
York... The setup of this novel is so frequently funny that it reads like
homage to classic Philip Roth."
Lethem's previous novel was Chronic City (2009), the tale of two
friends down on their luck-one an actor, the other a critic-as they go about
their lives in a surreal and futuristic Manhattan. The novel was named one of
the New York Times' "10 Best Books of 2009." Writing in the New
York Times Book Review, Gregory Cowles called it, "Astonishing....
Knowing and exuberant, with beautiful drunken sentences that somehow manage to
walk a straight line..... Intricate and seamless....A dancing showgirl of a
novel, yet beneath the gaudy makeup it's also the girl next door: a traditional
bildungsroman with a strong moral compass."
Other novels by Lethem include You Don't Love Me Yet (2007), The
Fortress of Solitude (2003), Girl in Landscape (1998), As She
Climbed Across the Table (1997), Amnesia Moon (1995) and Gun,
with Occasional Music (1994). The story of two friends (one black, one
white) growing up in the 1960s and '70s, The Fortress of Solitude became
a national bestseller and was named a New York Times "Editor's
Choice." Novelist Richard Russo called it, "a grim, brave, soaring
American masterpiece."
Lethem's most recent book of nonfiction is Fear of Music (2012), a
passionate tribute to and scholarly analysis of the Talking Heads' same-titled
third album. The reviewer for the London Observer called it,
"stylish and illuminating," and said, "be warned: his obsession
is contagious." Lethem's other nonfiction works include the essay
collection, The Ecstasy of Influence (2011), which features as its
title piece a widely-discussed defense of the act (and art) of plagiarism; The
Exegesis of Phillip K. Dick (2011, with Pamela Jackson), featuring
excerpts from the journals of one of Lethem's greatest literary heroes; and They
Live (2010), an analysis of John Carpenter's 1988 cult film of the same
name.
Lethem also edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing
on the Subject of Memory Loss (2000), and was the founding fiction editor
of Fence magazine.
For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or
online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.
Friday, August 16, 2013
Supreme Court Justice David Souter in Albany
David Souter, former U. S. Supreme Court Justice, will speak about the critical importance of funding humanities education and scholarship at the NY State Library in downtown Albany on September 12, 2013 on behalf of the New York Council on the Humanities.
Souter served on a special commission of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences which recently issued a report entitled, "The Heart of the Matter: The
Humanities and Social Sciences for a vibrant, competitive and secure
nation."
The Lyrical Violence of J. G. Ballard at RPI
EMPAC at Rensselaer (RPI) will present "Ballard," a theatre piece inspired by the work of innovative English writer J. G. Ballard (1930-2009), author of Crash, Empire of the Sun and a variety of dystopian and apocalyptic works of fiction.
Ballard
Kris Verdonck
A Two Dogs Company
September 7, 2013, 7PMAfter spending three weeks in residence, Belgian theater maker and visual artist Kris Verdonck invites the audience to an open studio and lecture demonstration of his innovative stereoscopic (3D) filming techniques developed with the EMPAC team. The presentation will provide insight into the microcosmic sets built on the theater stage, and a behind-the-scenes look at the development process.
BALLARD inhabits the world and characters from the apocalyptic science-fiction novels of J.G. Ballard, whose visionary descriptions of a future world resemble today’s neoliberal society more and more.
Verdonck’s visual arts, architecture, and theater training is reflected in the work he produces: his creations are situated in the transit zone between visual arts and theater, installation and performance, and dance and architecture.
Reservations are recommended and can be made in person at the box office or over the phone at 518.276.3921. Read More......