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
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Anti-sentimental romance fiction, tomorrow
Monday, March 19, 2012
"I Had a Very Severe Stepmother"
Elizabeth Floyd Mair interviews Scottish author Margot Livesey (who visits tomorrow) in the Times Union:
Q: What has the book Jane Eyre meant to you, and how is it connected to "The Flight of Gemma Hardy?"
A: I read Jane Eyre precociously when I was 9 years old. I pulled it out of my father's bookshelf, because it had a girl's name on the cover. And then, of course, it turned out to be about someone who was just about my age, and that was very appealing.
At the time, I was living with my father and stepmother on the grounds of the boys' school where my father taught in the Scottish Highlands. I could see the moors outside our living room window, and the school itself was a Gothic building with battlements that I could easily imagine as Thornfield Hall. I had a very severe stepmother, and it wasn't hard to turn her into Jane's aunt. Then, the year after I read the book, we moved to the south of Scotland, and I went to a very difficult boarding school. More.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Gothic Novels on Tuesday March 20th
Gothic novels will be the featured subject at multiple events on Tuesday, March 20th.
You are invited to two events with Margot Livesey, whose new novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, reimagines Charlotte Bronte's 1847 Gothic romance Jane Eyre in Scotland in the 1950s and 1960s. Livesey will share the stage with Jo Page, 4:15 PM in the Assembly Hall, Campus Center on the UAlbany uptown campus, and 7:30 PM in the Albany Public Library, Main Branch, 161 Washington Ave. in downtown Albany. The events are cosponsored by the Friends of the Albany Public Library.
Earlier that day, the Eighteenth-Century Reading Group and the English Department will sponsor a talk by Princeton University Professor Sophie Gee at 1 PM in HU 354. Professor Gee will be presenting a paper that connects Jane Austen’s satirical Gothic horror and romance novel, Northanger Abbey to questions of faith and belief in eighteenth-century novels. There will be a Q & A session and refreshments after the talk.
In 2007, Sophie Gee published her first novel, The Scandal of the Season, a comedy of manners set in eighteenth-century London and a retelling of Alexander Pope’s "The Rape of the Lock." The novel was named one of the Best Books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the Economist and is published in 13 countries.
For more information on the Gee event contact Michael Amrozowicz of the English Dept. at 518/442-4099 or mamrozowicz@albany.edu .
Friday, February 17, 2012
More Than a Match for Jane Eyre
Writing in The Daily Beast, Jane Ciabattari names Margot Livesey's new book a "Must Read."
Livesey visits Tuesday, March 20.
"Reinventing a beloved classic is a risky business, but it will come as no surprise to Margot Livesey’s admirers—a small but fervent group likely to be greatly enlarged by her wonderful new novel—that this abundantly gifted writer is more than a match for Jane Eyre. It’s not necessary to have read Charlotte Brontë’s protofeminist masterpiece to enjoy The Flight of Gemma Hardy, which works splendidly on its own terms, but the resonances and dissonances between these two compelling works enrich our appreciation of both." More.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
The Allure of the Gothic
The seductive appeal of eerie Gothic Lit is the topic of Cynthia Crossen's "Dear Book Lover" column in the WSJ.
Institute visitors mentioned in the column include Margot Livesey (who visits 3/20), Institute Writing Fellow James Lasdun (who teaches a community workshop this spring), the late Angela Carter (a former workshop instructor), the late Kurt Vonnegut (New York State Author), Joyce Carol Oates (who will visit our upcoming Summer Writers Institute) and Jennifer Egan.
Vonnegut formulates his own unpublished gothic novel as: "A young woman takes a job in an old house and gets the pants scared off her."
More.