Anti-sentimental romance fiction, tomorrow

Binnie Kirshenbaum, who reads at Skidmore tomorrow, July 4th, is celebrated for depictions of romantic love relationships in fiction that are never idealized and anything but sentimental.

Here's the Daily Beast on her most recent novel, The Scenic Route (2009):

“.... Binnie Kirshenbaum’s clever, offbeat novel The Scenic Route is an antidote to all that soft-focus sentiment. This is indeed a woman-has-midlife-crisis-and-finds-romance-in-Italy story, but it is so resolutely unsentimental, even antisentimental, that you won’t be dialing Alitalia anytime soon. Instead of escapist fantasy, narrator Sylvia Landsman offers a reality check, sobering truths about family, regret, loss, history—in fact, she provides commentary on all kinds of subjects..... Just about the only thing she doesn’t serve up is a happy ending.”
—The Daily Beast

Kirshenbaum shares the stage with award-winning poet, Frank Bidart.

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

Kirshenbaum also chairs the Writing Department at Columbia University School of the Arts: http://arts.columbia.edu/faculty/binnie-kirshenbaum

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Junot Diaz reviewed in the New York Times

"Junot Díaz writes in an idiom so electrifying and distinct it’s practically an act of aggression, at once alarming and enthralling, even erotic in its assertion of sudden intimacy...."

Read more of Leah Hager Cohen's review of Diaz's This is How You Lose Her in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review.

Diaz visits on Thursday Oct. 4th.

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Love Destroys Everything in Its Path-- Anne Enright

Writing in Oprah's O. magazine, Lizzie Skurnick reviews The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright, who comes to RPI on April 18th:

"In America we like our adultery straight up: a bubble of illicit passion that ends in regret. That's not what Irish novelist Anne Enright is serving in The Forgotten Waltz (Norton), which forgoes the simple morality tale for something more complex and satisfying. The novel begins as the otherwise involved Gina first sees the love of her life, the also-spoken-for Seán. Detailing the standard stuff of clandestine affairs—tawdry hotels, wife-stalking—Enright does not hide the ugliness of betrayal. But her real story is about the once illicit lovers' fraught attempt to live as a family—one that includes Seán's alarmingly strange preadolescent daughter, Evie. Casting aside cultural bromides about the immorality of affairs, Enright puts us squarely in the center of a terrible truth: Love can be miraculous—and still destroy everything in its path."

Original posting.

Picture: At her home near Bray, Ireland (from the New York Times)

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Love, Dark and Doomed

As her favorite Valentine's Day reading choice, New York Times Preview Editor Jen McDonald chose Anne Enright's The Gathering (2007).

Enright visits RPI under the cosponsorship of the Writers Institute on April 18th.

"I tend to like my literary love dark and doomed, so my pick is Anne Enright’s “The Gathering,” a novel whose tragedy unspools from a pulse-quickening romantic scene in the third chapter. It’s a flashback to the moment the narrator’s grandmother, Ada Merriman, first laid eyes on Lambert Nugent, who would not become her husband but would play an outsize role in the lives of her descendants...." More.

Enright also visited us in 2008.

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North Korean Love Story for Valentine's Day, 2/14

"Jun Do's mother was a singer. That was all Jun Do's father, the Orphan Master, would say about her. The Orphan Master kept a photograph of a woman in his small room at Long Tomorrows. She was quite lovely-eyes large and sideways looking, lips pursed with an unspoken word. Since beautiful women in the provinces get shipped to Pyongyang, that's certainly what had happened to his mother. The real proof of this was the Orphan Master himself. At night, he'd drink, and from the barracks, the orphans would hear him weeping and lamenting, striking half-heard bargains with the woman in the photograph. Only Jun Do was allowed to comfort him, to finally take the bottle from his hands."

"As the oldest boy at Long Tomorrows, Jun Do had responsibilities - portioning the food, assigning bunks, renaming the new boys from the list of the 114 Grand Martyrs of the Revolution. Even so, the Orphan Master was serious about showing no favoritism to his son, the only boy at Long Tomorrows who wasn't an orphan. When the rabbit warren was dirty, it was Jun Do who spent the night locked in it. When boys wet their bunks, it was Jun Do who chipped the frozen piss off the floor. Jun Do didn't brag to the other boys that he was the son of the Orphan Master, rather than some kid dropped off by parents on their way to a 9-27 camp. If someone wanted to figure it out, it was pretty obvious- Jun Do had been there before all of them, and the reason he'd never been adopted was because his father would never let someone take his only son. And it made sense that after his mother was stolen to Pyongyang, his father had applied for the one position that would allow him to both earn a living and watch over his son."

To read more, visit your local bookstore and buy the book!

Adam Johnson talks about his North Korean love story this coming Valentine's Day, Tuesday, February 14th.

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