Howard Frank Mosher, In Memoriam

The New York State Writers Institute mourns the passing of novelist Howard Frank Mosher who delighted Albany audiences on November 1st, 2016. Mosher was widely celebrated as "the voice of Vermont." Born in the Catskills, he spent much of his childhood in Altamont, New York.

From yesterday's Vermont Public Radio obituary:  "Acclaimed Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher has died. Mosher, 74, succumbed to cancer Sunday morning at his home in Irasburg.

His stories celebrated the Northeast Kingdom as the last bastion of a people and a way of life that has all but disappeared from Vermont."  More.


Listen to Joe Donahue's Nov. 1st WAMC interview.


More about Mosher's visit to the Writers Institute.


From the Oct. 2016 Times Union profile of Mosher by Joe Stalvey and Jack Rightmyer:  "I was actually born in the Catskill Mountains, and I lived there till I was 11 or 12," he says, "and then we moved to Altamont, where I attended grade six through nine. Many of my stories also reach back to that time in my boyhood."He fondly recalls fishing in the Helderberg Mountains and going to the Altamont Fair every summer. "The description of the county fair in my newest book 'God's Kingdom' is how I remember the Altamont Fair," he says. "("God's Kingdom") is pretty autobiographical," Mosher says. "Jim is based on me, and like him, I always wanted to be a writer. Most of the characters are based on my friends and relatives, including my wife. The newspaper editor is based on my dad, who was a teacher and once the principal of Altamont High School. He was the principal the first two years of Guilderland High School." More.

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Robert Coover's Rollicking Tale, Scathing Satire 1/31

We kick off an exciting Spring 2017 season with major American author Robert Coover who will present Huck Out West. The book is a rollicking adventure tale, an homage to Twain, and-- at the same time-- a scathing satire of American racism, greed and brutality.

January 31 (Tuesday): Robert Coover, award-winning fiction writer

Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center

Reading — 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center

Robert Coover, pioneer of experimental and electronic fiction, is celebrated for work that reinvents and reimagines the art of storytelling. The New York Times has called him “a one-man Big Bang of exploding creative force.”. His new novel, Huck Out West (2017), picks up where Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn leaves off – on the eve of the Civil War. In a starred review Booklist described the book as “a near-masterpiece…a surprisingly tender, touching paean to the power of storytelling and the pains of growing up.”

Cosponsored by UAlbany’s English Department to inaugurate its new Creative Writing minor

Following Huck west as he rides shotgun with the Pony Express, mines for gold, and lives with the Lakota, the novel explores a formative period in American history, from the Civil War to the

centennial year of 1876. In the West, it’s a time of grand adventure, but also one of greed, religious insanity, mass slaughter, virulent hatreds, widespread poverty and ignorance, ruthless military and civilian leadership, and huge disparities of wealth.

For more information about the upcoming Spring Series, visit http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html  or call 518 442 5620.

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Tiphanie Yanique on the NY Times Op Ed Page

Virgin Islands author Tiphanie Yanique, who visited us last week, explores the unknowns of her grandmother's Puerto Rican childhood on the Op Ed page of Wednesday's  New York Times:

My grandmother was raised in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico. She said the name, Vega Baja, meaning the “low plains,” with such romance that it was clear she longed for the place. In her stories she described a big house, and a farm where the children could eat the fruit from the trees and learned to milk a cow. Every Sunday after church they went to the beach. She taught herself to swim because the other children always played in the deep water and she hated being left behind.

More in the NY Times:  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/22/the-other-side-of-the-living-sea/

More about her visit with fellow first-time novelist Jacinda Townsend:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/townsend_yanique14.html

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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/

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Alison Lurie in National Geographic

Acclaimed novelist Alison Lurie, who opens our Fall 2014 Visiting Writers Series, is interviewed in the August 17 issue of  National Geographic:

Acclaimed Novelist Alison Lurie Thinks Buildings Say a Whole Lot About Us

Your house can tell others whether you’re happy or well organized or friendly—even what your politics are.

A critic once remarked that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alison Lurie writes so simply that a cat or a dog can understand her. It was meant as a compliment and taken as such. In her new book she turns her lucid gaze on a subject baffling to many of us: architecture.

In this candid interview she talks about what buildings tell us about their owners' aspirations and politics, why she built houses for fairies as a child, how she feels about being compared to Balzac and Jane Austen, and what her own home in upstate New York reveals about her.

More in National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/08/140817-alison-lurie-architecture-cornell-spoils-of-poynton-great-expectations-booktalk/

More about Alison Lurie's events in Albany:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lurie_alison14.html

More about the Fall 2014 Visiting Writers Series:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#lurie

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Akhil Sharma in The Paris Review

"It’s been almost fifteen years since Akhil Sharma published his first novel, An Obedient Father.
This terrible, improbably funny book—about a single mother forced to share an apartment with the father who raped her as a child—won Sharma a PEN/Hemingway prize, a Whiting Award, and praise from the likes of Jonathan Franzen and Joyce Carol Oates. (I remember because it was the first novel I had the honor of editing.) Now Sharma is back with Family Life, the tale of an Indian American boy coming of age in the shadow of a family disaster. "

"It too is terrible and improbably funny, and is excerpted in this week’s New Yorker. With acid, deceptively artless prose and a faultless ear for dialogue, Sharma strips his characters bare from page one and dares us to love them in their nakedness. I cannot think of a more honest or unsparing novelist in our generation." —Lorin Stein, The Paris Review

More about Sharma's events in Albany:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/sharma_akhil14.html

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Ebert on Ragtime

We will screen the film Ragtime tomorrow 2/7 in anticipation of a visit by E. L. Doctorow, major American novelist, on Thursday, 2/27.

More about the film series:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html

Roger Ebert reviewed Ragtime in 1981:

"Ragtime is a loving, beautifully mounted, graceful film that creates its characters with great clarity. We understand where everyone stands, and most of the time we even know why."

More:  http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ragtime-1981

Picture:  James Cagney in his final movie performance as New York Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo.

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An American Family Disillusioned with America

Ann Levin of the Huffington Post reviews Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem, who visits Albany
tomorrow:

Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, "Dissident Gardens," is a tour de force, a brilliant, satiric journey through America's dissident history from 1930s-era communism to today's Occupy movement.

Its central character is Rose Zimmer, a staunch member of the American Communist Party whose affair with a black policeman draws the wrath of party apparatchiks. After getting booted from the party, she turns her energy to community organizing in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, a housing development built in the 1920s to provide well-designed, affordable apartments with communal gardens to the urban working class.

More in the Huff Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20130909/us-book-review-dissident-gardens/?utm_hp_ref=style&ir=style

More about Lethem's visit to Albany on 9/11:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lethem_jonathan13.html

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Remembering Elmore Leonard, with Video

See a 2001 episode of "The Writer" featuring the late crime fiction genius Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), based on his visit to the New York State Writers Institute in September 2001, two days before the catastrophe of 9/11.

"The Writer" series was a coproduction of the NYS Writers Institute and PBS television station WMHT.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOPDVQNmOMs

Former Institute videographer Hugo Perez, director of "The Writer," introduces.

More on Leonard's visit to Albany: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/leonardelmore.html

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Jonathan Lethem Coming on September 11

Jonathan Lethem, prize-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City will open our Fall 2013 Visiting Writers Series.

Lethem will present his new novel, Dissident Gardens (2013), a family saga about three generations of New York City leftists.

“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.” (Kirkus)

Lethem visits 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.

Read more here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lethem_jonathan13.html

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Gillian Wright reviews City of Devi in India Today

"Using all the elements and methods at his disposal he creates flights of fiction that culminate finally in a gripping and impressive novel and prove him to be a master storyteller."

More:  http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/gillian-wright-reviews-the-city-of-devi-by-manil-suri/1/248489.html

More about Suri's visit to Albany on Friday, 4/19:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/suri_manil13.html

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Rave Review for James Salter on NPR

Alan Cheuse reviews All That Is by James Salter who visits Albany today:

"Reading this novel — and rereading it as I've been doing in preparation for this review — I found myself in a state that Salter's work, as with the finest writers we know, often induces. The writing is not breathtaking, but breath-enhancing. One seems to draw in more oxygen; the pulse races as when viewing some gloriously rugged and fast-paced adventure movie, or when, in a dream, you get caught up in some fabulous situation that you never imagined you had the power to invent. It's not furious action that excites in these pages, however, but rather Salter's clarity, precision and genius at concision. His emotion-packed sentences, often employing sharp and resonant metaphors, reveal the inner sensations and the truth of ordinary human experience as it plays out over time. Often writing only sentence fragments, Salter zeroes in on the absolutely correct details to evoke mood and place — "Night," we hear about a residence in upstate New York, "with the great river silent. Night with bits of rain. The entire house creaked in winter, and in the summer it felt like Bombay."

More:  http://www.npr.org/2013/04/03/175355818/real-writing-real-life-in-salters-all-that-is?sc=emaf

More about Salter's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/salter_james13.html

Picture: Salter in the cockpit of an Army fighter plane in the 1940s.

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Valentine's Day Cocktails from Women Authors

Bestselling novelist Ann Hood (The Knitting Circle) who visits the Institute 2/26, offers her favorite Valentine's Day cocktail:

“A lime mint Rickey: I recently returned from Cartagena Colombia and fell hard for their local concoction of fresh lime juice, mint and simple syrup over crushed ice. Also very tasty with dark rum in it!”

Cowboys Are My Weakness author Pam Houston, who visited in 2005, offers this: “Pretty in Pink: San Pellegrino (2 parts), pomegranate-cherry juice (1 part), slice of Meyer lemon, and lots of ice in a tall tumbler. It’s pretty, pink, and comforting (in case Valentine’s Day sucks).”

For more cocktails, go to http://www.prweb.com/releases/DrinkingDiaries/02/prweb10426112.htm

More on Hood's upcoming visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/mirabelli_hood13.html

More on Houston's 2005 visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/houston_pam.html

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Alison Lurie offers comic relief in yesterday's Times Union

State Author Offers Comic Relief

by Paul Grondahl

ALBANY — If novelist Alison Lurie takes out her needles and yarn during the speechifying at the state author and state poet awards on Thursday at a Writers Institute program, take it as a sign that even the honoree is bored.

Knitting was Lurie's silent protest against the gasbags who droned on during English department faculty meetings at Cornell University, where she taught writing and children's literature for nearly 40 years.

More in the TU:  http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/State-author-offers-comic-relief-3878975.php

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Alison Lurie, on being "too clever for her own good"

Alison Lurie, our new official New York State Author who speaks tonight at Page Hall, writes about being "too clever" as a little girl, and about coping with a birth injury that left her with facial atrophy and deafness in one ear.

"All young children, we know, are imaginative and creative; and while they remain young these qualities are usually fostered. The grubby but delightful paintings and naïve verses are extravagantly admired, shown to visitors, tacked to the kitchen walls. But as children grow older, encouragement of imaginative creation is often quietly replaced by encouragement of what have begun to seem more important traits: good manners, good marks, good looks; athletic and social success; and a willingness to earn money mowing lawns and baby-sitting - traits that are believed to predict adult success. Children who seem unlikely to do well along these lines sometimes find that their work stays on the kitchen wall longer than usual; and so it was with me. I was encouraged to be creative past the usual age because I didn't have much else going for me. I was a skinny, plain, off-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a birth injury, and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer. I was clever, or, as one of my teachers put it, 'too clever for her own good,' but not especially charming or affectionate or helpful. I couldn't seem to learn to ride a bike or sing in tune, and I was always the last person chosen for any team."

More in the New York Times.

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Cooperstown Author Lauren Groff's sister wins Beijing Triathlon

Not literary news, but we're posting anyway. Cooperstown author Lauren Groff, who visited us last March, is the sister of world champion triathlete Sarah Groff, who won the Beijing International Triathlon this past Sunday in in 2 hours, 4 minutes and 9 seconds. She also came in 4th at the London Olympics.

More in the Times Union.

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Our New Alison Lurie Page

Visit our new page for Alison Lurie, who will visit us on Thursday, September 20th to be inaugurated as New York's newest "Author Laureate," serving as New York State Author 2012-14 by executive order of Andrew Cuomo under the aegis of the New York State Writers Institute.

"Alison Lurie, is celebrated for witty and satirical novels that examine middle class American life, particularly in small northeastern college towns inspired by Ithaca, New York (where she has lived since 1961), and on the campuses of colleges inspired by Cornell University (where she taught from 1968 until her retirement as the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of American Literature in 1998)."

"For her nuanced understanding and lifelike portrayal of social customs and the relationships between the sexes, Lurie is widely regarded as the Jane Austen of contemporary American letters. Over the course of ten novels and half a century she has held a mirror up to people of her own generation as they navigate their lives."   More.

Picture from The Guardian.

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Teju Cole visits W. G. Sebald's grave in the New Yorker

Nigerian author Teju Cole, who visited us last February, tells of his pilgrimmage to W. G. Sebald's grave in the most recent issue of the New Yorker.

"Finally, coming around the chancel, I saw S.’s gravestone: a slab of dark marble, a slender marker shaded by a large green bush. There he is, I thought. The teacher I never knew, the friend I met only posthumously. Some water had trickled down the face of the slab, making the “S” of his name temporarily invisible, as well as the second “4” in 1944 and the “1” in 2001. The erasures put him into a peculiar timelessness. Along the top of the gravestone was a row of smooth small stones in different shades of brown and gray. There was a little space on the left. I picked up a stone from the ground and added it to the row. Then I knelt down."   More.
More about Teju Cole here.

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Is Dave Eggers the Norman Mailer of the 21st century?

Pico Iyer wonders whether Dave Eggers (who visited the Institute in 2004) is the Norman Mailer of the 21st century.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/books/review/a-hologram-for-the-king-by-dave-eggers.html?pagewanted=all

Mailer visited last in 2007, shortly before he died. He also served as New York State Author under the auspices of the Writers Institute 1991-93.

Eggers' visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/eggers_dave.html

Mailer's last visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/mailer.html

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Francine Prose at Occupy Wall St.

Francine Prose, who appears tonight in Saratoga, writes:

"As far as I can understand it myself, here’s why I burst into tears at the Occupy Wall Street camp. I was moved, first of all, by what everyone notices first: the variety of people involved, the range of ages, races, classes, colors, cultures. In other words, the 99 per cent. I saw conversations taking place between people and groups of people whom I’ve never seen talking with such openness and sympathy in all the years (which is to say, my entire life) I’ve spent in New York: grannies talking to goths, a biker with piercings and tattoos talking to a woman in a Hermes scarf."   More.

Prose will share the stage with novelist Rick Moody, tonight, 7/26, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

Click here for more events in the series. All are free and open to the general public.

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