Tom Junod opens the Visiting Writers Series

One of America's most honored practitioners of magazine journalism, Tom Junod will return to his alma mater, the University at Albany, to meet with students and the general public on Thursday, September 10th. He'll speak again as part of a 9/11 memorial on Friday at the NYS Museum.

More about his events:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/junod_tom15.html

Here are some of Junod's articles in the Longform Archive:  http://longform.org/writers/tom-junod

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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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Exterminating Angel: "Like rats in an overpopulation study"

Friday's film at Page Hall is Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962)-- part of the Food, Crime and Justice film series, cosponsored by the School of Criminal Justice. William Kennedy, novelist, screenwriter and Institute Executive Director, and Donald Faulkner, Institute Director, will provide commentary after the film.

Here's a review and reassessment by the late Roger Ebert that appeared in May 1997:

The dinner guests arrive twice. They ascend the stairs and walk through the wide doorway, and then they arrive again--the same guests, seen from a higher camera angle. This is a joke and soon we will understand the punch line: The guests, having so thoroughly arrived, are incapable of leaving.

Luis Bunuel's "The Exterminating Angel" (1962) is a macabre comedy, a mordant view of human nature that suggests we harbor savage instincts and unspeakable secrets. Take a group of prosperous dinner guests and pen them up long enough, he suggests, and they'll turn on one another like rats in an overpopulation study.

More: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-exterminating-angel-1962

More about the event:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#angel

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Enthralling theater and television....

“Enthralling theater and television… This is dramatized legal history of the best kind,” said New York Times reviewer Ginia Bellafante of Friday's film, Thurgood, 7:30 p.m. at Page Hall, 9/20.

Bellafante approaches this piece of filmed theater skeptically at first, but is wildly enthusiastic by the end of her review:

"As a form the teleplay is mired in its own noble pedantry, which is why the arrival of “Thurgood” on HBO on Thursday initially seems dubious — especially so, perhaps, because it is a one-man enterprise even more heavily prone to the sensibility of tutorial."

Full review here:  http://tv.nytimes.com/2011/02/24/arts/television/24thurgood.html?_r=0

Full Classic Film Series schedule here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html

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Tom Perrotta's New Novel To Be HBO Series

HBO is developing a series based on author Tom Perrotta's upcoming novel "The Leftovers."

Hourlong drama explores the Rapture and how the sudden disappearance of loved ones in a suburban town affects everyone left behind. Perrotta, who is writing the pilot, will exec produce with Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger.

The author has Hollywood connections, having written "Little Children" and then adapting the screenplay for the Kate Winslet-Patrick Wilson starrer. Earlier in his career, Perrotta wrote the novel "Election," which was turned into Alexander Payne's feature starring Reese Witherspoon. Both pics were Oscar nominated. More in Variety.

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