The Paris Review: James Lasdun, Lydia Davis

Two NYS Writers Institute Writing Fellows are featured prominently in the Spring 2015 issue of The Paris Review.

James Lasdun has a 70-page novella, Feathered Glory:
http://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/6362/feathered-glory-james-lasdun

Lydia Davis is interviewed:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6366/art-of-fiction-no-227-lydia-davis

Other featured authors who have appeared as part of the Institute's Visiting Writers Series include Major Jackson, Charles Simic and Stephen Dunn.

And, incidentally, the Capital Region's own Bernie Conners, former publisher of The Paris Review, has a new memoir, Cruising with Kate: A Parvenu in Xanadu (2015). Read Paul Grondahl's interview in the Times Union:  http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-local/article/Paul-Grondahl-Bernard-Conners-memoir-recalls-a-6156657.php

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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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Ann Beattie, Asking Questions Without Answers

Ann Beattie, major novelist who reads to you tomorrow in Saratoga, tells the Paris Review in a 2011 interview:  "It took me years and years to realize a very simple thing, which is that when you write fiction you’re raising questions, and a lot of people think you’re playing a little game with them and that actually you know the answers to the questions. They read your question. They don’t know how to answer correctly. And they think that if they could only meet you personally and look into your eyes, you could give them the answers."

"At readings I’m quite often speechless, actually. I am really very happy that I am striking a nerve. But it’s when they take it a step further and think that I have the salve for the nerve I’ve hit, or that I have personally lived through that myself, and that therefore we have a common bond, ­because they have also lived through that—then I begin to realize that what is ­between me and other people isn’t kinship, but a kind of a gulf."

The New York State Summer Writers Institute presents Ann Beattie tomorrow, Wednesday, July 3rd.

All readings are at 8:00 p.m. in Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, and are free and open to the public.

Full interview:  http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6070/the-art-of-fiction-no-209-ann-beattie

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

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Kennedy Reads Tonight in Saratoga

William Kennedy will read from his work tonight, Wednesday, July 18th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga.

Executive Director of the New York Writers Institute, Kennedy is the author most recently of Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, set in revolutionary Cuba and 1960s Albany.

Here's an excerpt from Elizabeth Donnelly's interview with Kennedy in last November's Paris Review:

Donnelly: Like your character Daniel Quinn, you’ve met Castro. What’s it like, talking with Fidel?

Kennedy: Well, it’s absolutely like nothing else. He showed up the first day I was in Cuba, in 1987. I was in the house of [Gabriel] García Márquez. It was after lunch, I was sitting in the rocking chair, and Gabriel—Gabo—said to me, “Would you mind moving to another chair? The Comandante is coming and he likes the rocker.” Fidel came in, in his field jacket and his cap. He was very bulky in the chest and was probably wearing a bulletproof vest.

He stuck around for about three and a half hours. We talked about literature, movies. I was about to go into production for Ironweed. He was very genial and he arranged all of my itinerary. He arranged for me to go to Santiago and then up to Holguin, to fly over to the Isle of Pines, where he had been in prison.

We also talked about making Scotch, because he had some Czechoslovakian hops and he had sent some people to Scotland to find out how to make Scotch. He made some and I promptly got a bottle and drank some. More

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

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