New Yorker's Best Books of 2013

The New Yorker asked its critics to pick the best 3 or 4 books they read this year (not necessarily new books). Part one of the list appeared December 10th.

Among the books by past visitors to the Writers Institute who appear on the various lists so far are Seeing Things by the late Seamus Heaney (pictured here), Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart, Stay, Illusion by Lucie Brock-Broido, Chasing Utopia by Nikki Giovanni, My Education by Susan Choi and A Permanent Member of the Family by Russell Banks.

Article in the New Yorker:  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/12/best-books-of-2013-part-one.html

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Silent Film with Live Piano Tonight!

PEOPLE ON SUNDAY [MENSCHEN AM SONNTAG]
September 27 (Friday)
 Film screening — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
Directed by Robert Siodmak
(Germany, 1930, 74 minutes, b/w, silent with live piano accompaniment by Mike Schiffer)

The flirtations of a summer Sunday at the beach in Weimar Germany provide the principal content of a film that helped launch the careers of some of 20th century Hollywood’s most influential filmmakers, including Robert Siodmak (THE KILLERS), Billy Wilder (SUNSET BOULEVARD), Fred Zinnemann (FROM HERE TO ETERNITY), horror movie screenwriter Curt Siodmak (THE WOLFMAN), and B-movie king Edgar G. Ulmer (DETOUR). Blending documentary footage and fictional storytelling, the film features the camera work of Eugen Schüfftan, better known for Fritz Lang’s spectacular METROPOLIS (1927)

A review in The Believer by Jessica Winter, former senior editor of Oprah's O. magazine:

The German silent film People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag, 1930) bills itself as “a film without actors.” But it’s not without stars—future stars, that is, of the behind-the-camera variety. Billy Wilder, who wrote the spare screenplay, would become one of the preeminent writer-directors of midcentury Hollywood: he made Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard and, in the space of just over one glorious year, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. The codirectors were Robert Siodmak—who later helmed the sharp Burt Lancaster noirs The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949)—and Edgar G. Ulmer, whose eclectic, super-low-budget résumé would eventually span melodramas, musicals, horror, and the grimy noir masterpiece Detour (1945). The assistant cinematographer was Fred Zinnemann, future director of High Noon (1952) and From Here to Eternity (1953). You can trace the DNA of a golden age in American cinema back to this quasi-documentary snapshot of a weekend in Berlin circa 1930.

More:  http://www.believermag.com/issues/201103/?read=dvd_winter

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Jonathan Lethem's Favorite Songs in Elle Magazine

Jonathan Lethem, bestselling novelist whose work is saturated with references to pop music (and who visits us on the portentous date of 9/11), lists his favorite songs in the recent issue of Elle magazine, including songs that served as inspiration in writing his new, critically-acclaimed novel, Dissident Gardens.

http://www.elle.com/pop-culture/reviews/jonathan-lethem-playlist

Among the songs is the 1961 "Talkin' Hava Nagila Blues" by a young Bob Dylan (still Robert Zimmerman, pictured here).

Listen to it here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rwrSGPd4ZE

For more on Lethem's upcoming visit to Albany visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lethem_jonathan13.html

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FENCE Magazine Open for Submissions

ATTENTION ALL WRITERS

Fence magazine will be accepting new submissions of poetry, fiction, and everything else for the whole month of August(the gateway closes 8/31/13 at exactly 11:59pm EST).

Please keep in mind our SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Each poem and story MUST be submitted individually. This will help us keep better track of withdrawn pieces. Submit no more than five poems at any one time, and up to twenty-five pages of fiction.

If you wish to submit more than one document, you MUST submit each document separately. Submissions containing more than one poem or story will not be read.

Thank you, and consider the floodgates OPEN. 

https://fence.submittable.com/submit

Founded in 1998 by Rebecca Wolff, Fence is a biannual journal of poetry, fiction, art, and criticism that has a mission to redefine the terms of accessibility by publishing challenging writing distinguished by idiosyncrasy and intelligence rather than by allegiance with camps, schools, or cliques. It is Fence‘s mission to encourage writing that might otherwise have difficulty being recognized because it doesn’t answer to either the mainstream or to recognizable modes of experimentation. Fence is long-term committed to publishing from the outside and the inside of established communities of writing, seeking always to interrogate, collaborate with, and bedevil other systems that bring new writing to light.

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Playing Dress Up at Edith Wharton's "The Mount"

A number of writers and actors dressed up as members of Edith Wharton's inner circle at her Lenox estate, The Mount, for a fashion photo shoot by legendary photographer Annie Liebovitz. The pictures will appear in the September issue of Vogue.

Among the writers were Junot Diaz (who will visit us in October 2012) as Walter Berry; Jonathan Safran Foer as architect Ogden Codman, Jr.; and Jeffery Eugenides as Henry James. The issue also features an essay by past Institute visitor Colm Toibin about Edith Wharton and her complicated love triangle with Morton Fullerton and Henry James.

Photo: supermodel Natalia Vodianova as Edith Wharton.

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