Her All-Time Favorite Short Stories-- Ann Beattie

Ann Beattie, who visits this coming Tuesday, shares some of her all-time favorite short stories in a New York Times "By the Book" interview:

Among them: “Twilight of the Superheroes” and “Your Duck Is My Duck,” by Deborah Eisenberg; “Way Down Deep in the Jungle,” by Thom Jones; “Oxygen,” by Ron Carlson; “Nettles” and “The Albanian Virgin,” by Alice Munro; “The Fat Girl,” by Andre Dubus; “We Didn’t,” by Stuart Dybek; “Tits-Up in a Ditch,” by Annie Proulx; “Bruns,” by Norman Rush; “Escapes,” by Joy Williams; “Yours,” by Mary Robison; “The Dog of the Marriage,” by Amy Hempel; “The Fireman’s Wife,” by Richard Bausch; “The Womanizer,” by Richard Ford; “Helping,” by Robert Stone; “No Place for You, My Love,” by Eudora Welty; “Are These Actual Miles,” by Raymond Carver; “People Like That Are The Only People Here,” by Lorrie Moore; “Last Night,” by James Salter; “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story,” by Russell Banks; “Hunters in the Snow,” by Tobias Wolff; Rebecca Lee’s collection, “Bobcat.”

More in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/books/review/ann-beattie-by-the-book.html?ref=books&_r=1

More about Ann Beattie's 2 events with Peg Boyers this Tuesday, 9/29:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/beattie_boyers15.html

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Josh Bartlett wins Garber Prize

Congratulations to Writers Institute Grad Assistant Josh Bartlett for winning the Spring 2014 Eugene K. Garber Prize for Short Fiction for his story, "French Twist."

Photo:  Josh with Alex Trebek during his appearance on Jeopardy! in 2012 (the show aired on Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, November 22nd).

The prize is endowed by Professor Emeritus Gene Garber of the UAlbany English Department:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/garber_eugene_k.html

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Lydia Davis Interviewed on NPR

 

Lydia Davis, Writers Institute Writing Fellow who will be the featured guest at RPI's 73rd Annual McKinney Writing Contest and Reading (Wed., April 16, free and open to the public) was interviewed last week by NPR's Rachel Martin.

More about Lydia's appearance at Rensselaer:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/davis_lydia14.html

From Rachel Martin's interview:

On the moment when she realized that she didn't need to write long to write well
I can date that pretty precisely to the fall of 1973. So I was 26 years old and I had just been reading the short stories or the prose poems of Russell Edson. And for some reason, I was sparked by those. I thought, "These are fun to read, and provocative and interesting, and I'd like to try this." So I set myself the challenge of writing two very short stories every day just to see what would happen.

On how she knows when to end a story
I think I have a sense right in the beginning of how big an idea it is and how much room it needs, and, almost more importantly, how long it would sustain anybody's interest. And that's sometimes been a problem with a story when it's sort of offered me two ways that it could go, and I have to choose one or the other.

More on the NPR website:  http://www.npr.org/2014/04/06/299053017/lydia-davis-new-collection-has-stories-shorter-than-this-headline

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Julia Glass on Francesca Marciano

Last week's guest, National Book Award winner Julia Glass [pictured here], contributes a praise blurb to this Friday's guest's new story collection, The Other Language:

“I loved every single one of these affecting, suspenseful, and sublimely crafted stories. It’s clear that Francesca Marciano is worldly as well as wise, yet what she’s surprisingly insightful about is the hazardous nature of worldliness itself. Because our modern lives are so mobile, our ways of communicating so refined, we risk coming to believe that the borders defining class, culture, and gender are somehow more permeable. Think again, she tells us in these nine cautionary tales—the best new collection I’ve read in years.” —Julia Glass

Francesca Marciano visits tomorrow:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/marciano_francesca14.html

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"Honey" film reviewed in the LA Times

Sheri Linden of the Los Angeles Times reviews the new Italian film Honey [Miele], coscripted by Francesca Marciano, who visits the Writers Institute to talk about the film (an official selection at Cannes) this coming Friday:

Whether she's trysting with her married lover or helping other people die, the title character of Honey is a fascinating and complex figure, and Jasmine Trinca inhabits the role with a detached intensity that's thoroughly compelling.

The Italian film — the assured feature-directing debut by actress Valeria Golino, still best known to American audiences for Rain Man — achieves the rare feat of addressing euthanasia head-on without devolving into a dramatized treatise or a button-pushing issue movie.

More in the L. A. Times:  http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-honey-review-20140314,0,2797373.story#axzz2yPD5PNdZ

More about our events with Francesca Marciano:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/marciano_francesca14.html

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George Saunders wins Folio Prize

George Saunders, bestselling short story writer who visited us in February 2013, has won the prestigious Folio Prize in England.

Full press release here:  http://www.thefolioprize.com/2014/03/george-saunders-wins-the-folio-prize/

More about his visit here: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/saunders_george13.html

Time magazine called Saunders, "The best short story writer in English – not ‘one of’, not ‘arguably’, but the Best."

 

Saunders is a vaguely familiar face from the early days of the Writers Institute when his wife had a fellowship to study here with Toni Morrison:

 

http://nyswiblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/george-saunders-old-friend-as-it-turns.html

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Steve Hartman's Translation of Sleet Nominated for Prize

Sleet, a collection of stories by major Swedish author Stig Dagerman (1923-1954), translated into English by former NYS Writers Institute graduate assistant Steve Hartman, has been longlisted for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award.

 

Hartman visited us last October for a celebration of Stig Dagerman, who committed suicide in 1954 at the age of 31. The celebration was also attended by Lo Dagerman, Stig's daughter with Swedish movie star Anita Björk.

Picture: Stig Dagerman.

More about the award nomination:

http://www.typographicalera.com/best-translated-book-award-2014-longlist/

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-best-translated-book-awards-fiction-longlist-20140311,0,7306087.story#axzz2vhgDDxD7

https://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/

More about the Celebration of Stig Dagerman in October 2013:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/dagerman_hartman13.html

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Lydia Davis profiled in this week's New Yorker

 

Lydia Davis, NYS Writers Institute Writing Fellow, is profiled in the March 17th issue of the New Yorker.

"Somewhere in the files of General Mills is a letter from the very-short-story writer Lydia Davis. In it, Davis, who is widely considered one of the most original minds in American fiction today, expresses dismay at the packaging of the frozen peas sold by the company’s subsidiary Cascadian Farm. The letter, like many things that Davis writes, had started out sincere and then turned weird. Details grew overly specific; a narrative, however spare, emerged. “The peas are a dull yellow green, more the color of pea soup than fresh peas and nothing like the actual color of your peas, which are a nice bright dark green,” she wrote. “We have compared your depiction of peas to that of the other frozen peas packages and yours is by far the least appealing. . . . We enjoy your peas and do not want your business to suffer. Please reconsider your art.” Rather than address her complaint, the company sent her a coupon for Green Giant."

More in the New Yorker:   http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/17/140317fa_fact_goodyear

Davis (who poses frequently with cats) speaks on Wednesday, April 16 at Rensselaer (RPI):

Lydia Davis, short story author and translator
April 16 (Wednesday)
Reading and McKinney Writing Contest Award Ceremony — 8:00 p.m., Biotech Auditorium, Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, Rensselaer (RPI), Troy

Lydia Davis, winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, will read from her newest story collection, Can’t and Won’t (2014). Masterpieces in miniature, the stories feature complaint letters, reflections on dreams, and small dilemmas. Davis has been called “one of the quiet giants of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review), and “one of the best writers in America” (Oprah’s O Magazine). Her previous collections include The Collected Stories (2009), Varieties of Disturbance (2007), Samuel Johnson is Indignant (2001), Almost No Memory (1997) and Break it Down (1986).

Sponsored in conjunction with RPI’s Vollmer W. Fries Lecture and the 73rd McKinney Writing Contest and Reading
For directions see: http://www.rpi.edu/tour/index.html

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T. C. Boyle Visits Tomorrow

Q: A lot of your stories in this volume present characters, usually men, who are so self-absorbed that they necessarily veer toward disaster. Is your view of human nature more dark than light?

A: I have lived one of the most fortunate of human lives, surrounded by light and love. I have known my closest friend since I was 3 1/2 years old, my children are slim and tall and beautiful and smarter than all the computers in the world combined, and I remain the only writer in history only to have one wife, the legendary Karen Kvashay, my college sweetheart at SUNY Potsdam.

Still, I do suspect that the universe doesn't care much about any of this or any of us and that accident rules the world. Fiction is a place for examining the darker scenarios, the ones we hope to avoid.

Read more of Elizabeth Floyd Mair's interview in Sunday's Times Union:
http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Tales-to-tell-4866512.php

T. C. Boyle, fiction writer
October 8 (Tuesday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus

T. C. Boyle, “one of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers of his generation” (New York Times), is the bestselling author of fourteen novels and nine short story collections. His newest book is T. C. Boyle Stories II (October 2013), a 944-page sequel to T. C. Boyle Stories (1998), winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction. Michael Anderson of the New York Times Book Review described the latter as “700 flashy, inventive pages of stylistic and moral acrobatics.” Boyle’s novels include San Miguel (2012), Drop City (2003), The Road to Wellville (1993), and World’s End (1987).

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"The Short Story of Lydia Davis's Man Booker Prize"

Published May 23, 2013:  Lydia Davis was awarded the Man Booker International Prize yesterday. It’s hard not to be pleased when someone wins a prestigious literary award for writing stories as short as this one:

Often I think that his idea of what we should do is wrong, and my idea is right. Yet I know that he has often been right before, when I was wrong. And so I let him make his wrong decision, telling myself, though I can’t believe it, that his wrong decision may actually be right. And then later it turns out, as it often has before, that his decision was the right one, after all. Or, rather, his decision was still wrong, but wrong for circumstances different from the circumstances as they actually were, while it was right for circumstances I clearly did not understand.

More on the New York Times blog:  http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/the-short-story-of-lydia-daviss-man-booker-prize/?_r=0

Lydia Davis meets with the general public on Tuesday, October 1st at UAlbany.

More about her event here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/davis_lydia13a.html

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The Short, Short Stories of Lydia Davis

The New York Times blog discusses the shortness of Lydia Davis's short stories following the announcement of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize:

http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/the-short-story-of-lydia-daviss-man-booker-prize/

Lydia will teach another multiple-week Community Writers Workshop in Fall 2013 (free and open to the public on a competitive basis).

More about her here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/davis_lydia13.html

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President Jones Congratulates Lydia Davis on Her Booker International Prize

“Lydia Davis has repeatedly challenged our notions of storytelling, and in doing so has influenced a generation of writers, both here in Albany and on the international stage,” said UAlbany President Robert J. Jones. “We’re extremely proud of her great honor and international acclaim.”

 

More about Lydia Davis and the 2013 Man Booker International Prize here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/davis_lydia13.html

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Our Own Lydia Davis Wins the Booker International Prize!

Lydia Davis, leading author of short fiction, New York State Writers Institute Writing Fellow, and a University at Albany English Department faculty member, has been awarded the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in the world of literature. The award is given every two years to an author of any nationality in order to recognize an outstanding body of work in English or available in English translation. Sir Christopher Ricks, chair of the judges’ panel, said that Davis’s “writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind. Just how to categorise them? They have been called stories but could equally be miniatures, anecdotes, essays, jokes, parables, fables, texts, aphorisms or even apophthegms, prayers or simply observations…. There is a vigilance to her stories, and great imaginative attention.”

Writing in the Guardian (UK) in 2009, Hephzibah Anderson declared that the Booker International Prize “is fast becoming the more significant award, appearing an ever more competent alternative to the Nobel.” Previous winners have included Philip Roth (2011), Alice Munro (2009), Chinua Achebe (2007) and Ismail Kadare (2005). The prize is £60,000 (approximately $91,000).

Lydia Davis has been called “one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review), “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon), and “one of the best writers in America” (O Magazine). She is renowned in literary circles for perfecting the craft of the “extremely short short story,” and has begun to enjoy a much wider readership. Novelist Dave Eggers has said that Davis’s work, “blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction.”

This coming fall semester at UAlbany, Davis is scheduled to teach a tuition-free writing workshop over the course of several weeks, open to the public on a competitive basis, under the sponsorship of the New York State Writers Institute. Davis has taught community writing workshops for the Institute on five previous occasions (2005-2009). She first visited UAlbany in 2000 as a guest of the Institute’s Visiting Writers Series. During that visit, Institute Director Donald Faulkner, among others, suggested she apply for a teaching position in the English Department. She joined the faculty and became an Institute Writing Fellow in 2002. Faulkner commented, “We are very proud to count Lydia Davis among our Fellows. She is a great talent, an excellent teacher, and a wonderful colleague. She richly deserves this award.”

Her newest book is The Collected Stories (2009), a compilation of stories from four previously published volumes including Varieties of Disturbance (2007), Samuel Johnson is Indignant (2001), Almost No Memory (1997) and Break it Down (1986). Appearing to rave reviews in the mainstream press, the book is being described as a “surprise bestseller” by its publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux.

In a New Yorker review, James Wood said, “Finally, one can read a large portion of Davis’s work, spanning three decades and more than seven hundred pages, and a grand cumulative achievement comes into view— a body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom. I suspect that [the book] will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal, like the work of Flannery O’Connor, or Donald Barthelme, or J. F. Powers.”

Davis received a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation award in 2003. In granting the award the Foundation praised Davis’s work for showing “how language itself can entertain, how all that what one word says, and leaves unsaid, can hold a reader’s interest…. Davis grants readers a glimpse of life’s previously invisible details, revealing new sources of philosophical insights and beauty.”

A Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, Davis is also one of the most respected translators into English of French literary fiction by Proust, Flaubert, Foucault and Blanchot. In 2003, Davis published a new translation— the first in more than 80 years— of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, Swann’s Way (2003), one of the most important literary works of the 20th century. The Sunday Telegraph (London) called the new translation “A triumph [that] will bring this inexhaustible artwork to new audiences throughout the English-speaking world.” Writing for the Irish Times, Frank Wynne said, “What soars in this new version is the simplicity of language and fidelity to the cambers of Proust’s prose… Davis’ translation is magnificent, precise.” Her 2010 translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary also received high praise in major publications throughout the world.

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620.

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A Writer on the Edge-- Nathan Englander

"Author Nathan Englander says there is a thin line between the work of his craft — obsessively, compulsively tweaking and writing and rewriting — and full-on madness. For him, that line is publication. In the months since his latest collection of short stories was published, Englander has been traveling, meeting people who feel they know him because they read his book. He's comfortable with that."

Nathan Englander visits UAlbany tomorrow: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/englander_nathan13.html

Read more of Leigh Hornbeck's profile of Englander in the Times Union:
http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/A-writer-on-the-edge-4337366.php

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TU Review of George Saunders Event

"Your main job as a writer is to grab by the lapels and compel. I always tell students drop the facade, relax into the idea that the essential you is there and you have to let it come in."

Nana Adjei-Brenyah reviews George Saunders' presentation at UAlbany in the Times Union:
http://www.timesunion.com/entertainment/article/Author-Saunders-entertains-4300887.php

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The Aching Banality of Our Times-- George Saunders

"Short story master George Saunders is fascinated by one of the great stories of the modern age — and it’s not climate change, not the world at war. Rather: It is the aching banality of our times. The pervasive McCulture. And how it robs us of our humanity, contorts our moral bearings, separates us from true feeling."

"In fiction and his essays, Saunders examines the ways in which the forces of corporate capitalism — and our own material urges — numb us, dumb us and humiliate us. He commands us to take a hard look at the absurd logic-language of Group Think or Management Speak. Then, in the spirit of communal recognition, he invites us to laugh out loud at it."

Read more by Brad Buchholz in the Austin American-Statesman:  http://www.statesman.com/news/entertainment/books-literature/humor-and-hurting/nTs4c/

Saunders visits UAlbany today:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/saunders_george13.html

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"The Best Book You'll Read This Year"

George Saunders, who visits Albany this coming Wednesday, is achieving a kind of popular renown and name recognition that is usually unknown to literary short story writers.

This January 2013 New York Times article certainly helped introduce him to a wider readership:

George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year

It’s the trope of all tropes to say that a writer is “the writer for our time.” Still, if we were to define “our time” as a historical moment in which the country we live in is dropping bombs on people about whose lives we have the most abstracted and unnuanced ideas, and who have the most distorted notions of ours; or a time in which some of us are desperate simply for a job that would lead to the ability to purchase a few things that would make our kids happy and result in an uptick in self- and family esteem; or even just a time when a portion of the population occasionally feels scared out of its wits for reasons that are hard to name, or overcome with emotion when we see our children asleep, or happy when we risk revealing ourselves to someone and they respond with kindness — if we define “our time” in these ways, then George Saunders is the writer for our time.

Read more here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/magazine/george-saunders-just-wrote-the-best-book-youll-read-this-year.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Read more about Saunders' visit to the New York State Writers Institute on Wed., Feb. 20th here:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/saunders_george13.html

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Writers Institute Announces Spring 2013 Series

Dear Readers, Writers, Teachers, Students and All Members of the General Public,

The New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany announces its Spring 2013 schedule of visiting writer appearances and film series screenings. Events take place on the UAlbany uptown and downtown campuses and are free and open to the public (unless otherwise noted).

Visiting Writers Series:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html

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

The Spring 2013 Visiting Writers Series features appearances by a Tony-nominated Broadway actor; a leading voice of the New York Times Editorial and Op-Ed pages; a visionary scientist who is the "founding father" of nanotechnology; a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who explores spiritual and moral crises in America; a MacArthur fellow who has been called "the funniest writer in America"; a major American novelist who, at age 87, will present his first novel in 30 years; and a new, award-winning Ken Burns documentary to be screened, by special arrangement, eleven days in advance of its national PBS television air date.

"The new spring 2013 Visiting Writers Series was a profound pleasure to put together-so many interesting, talented authors!-from first book writers like the memoirist Christa Parravani and New York historian Marguerite Holloway, through to well-established novelists like Marilynne Robinson, Chris Bohjalian, and James Salter, we're once more able to present the best in contemporary literature. This is one of our strongest line-ups in recent years," said Institute Director Donald Faulkner.

The season will open with the annual Burian Lecture delivered by Tony-nominated actor Colman Domingo, a rising star of the American stage, a "blazingly charismatic performer" (New York Times), and a playwright whose work has been called, "Wicked, tender, outrageous and profound" (Newsday).

That same week, influential futurist and ground-breaking environmental scientist Jorgen Randers will present his new book, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, a cautionary view of the earth's future and the collapse of its natural resources. An opposite forecast is offered at the end of our season by K. Eric Drexler, the "founding father" of nanotechnology presenting his latest book, Radical Abundance, which argues that nanoscience will usher in a new age of plenty. Other nonfiction writers featured this season include noted photographer Christa Parravani with a piercing memoir about the death of her identical twin sister; award-winning poet and nature writer Gretel Ehrlich, who writes about her visits to tsunami-ravaged Japan; Columbia University Science Journalism program director Marguerite Holloway presenting a deep history of Manhattan's street grid; colonial historian Russell Shorto, whose work on Dutch New York "permanently alter[ed] the way we regard our collective past" (New York Times); and Gail Collins, one of the wittiest political commentators in American journalism.

George Saunders and Nathan Englander, major prize-winning short story writers, will be featured among our visiting fiction writers. UAlbany Professor Emeritus Gene Mirabelli will present his new novel about the valiant struggles of an aging painter. Mirabelli will share the stage with Ann Hood, bestselling author of The Knitting Circle, who is well-known for finding inspiration in the challenges posed by grief and loss. Eighty-seven-year-old James Salter, one of the most acclaimed American novelists of the last half century, will present his first novel in 30 years, All That Is (Salter will not be touring with his book, and his appearance at the Institute will be a unique privilege). Novelist Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Gilead (2004), will deliver the 72nd Annual McKinney Reading and Vollmer Fries Lecture at Rensselaer (RPI). Manil Suri, Indian-American novelist and mathematician, will visit with a new novel set in Mumbai under threat of nuclear attack. Finally, Chris Bohjalian, a prolific writer of bestsellers and Oprah Book Club author, will present his new epic of the Armenian genocide, Sandcastle Girls.

"Our re-energized film series continues its year-long collaboration with the School of Criminal Justice, and also with film critic J. Hoberman, who has acted as guest curator in the selection process," said Faulkner.

The spring selections for the Future of Film series curated by Hoberman include the Russian 2002 film, RUSSIAN ARK, the French-Taiwanese 2007 film, FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON; the Romanian 2005 film, THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU; and, in advance of St. Patrick's Day, HUNGER, an Irish 2008 film about Bobby Sands and the 1981 Prison Hunger Strike.

The second mini-series, Justice & Multiculturalism in the 21st Century, is part of a multifaceted project sponsored by UAlbany's School of Criminal Justice, aimed at engaging conversations about the intersection of social justice and criminal justice. The spring series will open with HOMELAND: FOUR PORTRAITS OF NATIVE ACTION (2006), an artfully constructed film about environmental disasters on American Indian reservations. The second film will be CENTRAL PARK FIVE (2012), a new look at the Central Park Jogger case by major documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, codirected with his daughter Sarah Burns and David McMahon, based on Sarah Burns' book. The film received "Best Documentary" at the 2012 New York Critics Circle Awards. A member of the film's directorial team is scheduled to attend the screening and provide commentary. The final film in the series will be ONCE WERE WARRIORS (1995), a Maori drama about alcoholism and family violence set in a New Zealand housing project.

As is our tradition, the Institute will also screen a silent film with live musical accompaniment-the influential 1921 German film by Fritz Lang, DESTINY [DER MÜDE TOD], a dark fairy tale about love and death.

For more information, visit our website at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html.   Also, don’t forget to like us on Facebook!

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Junot Diaz Wins MacArthur "Genius" Award

Junot Diaz, who visits Albany Thursday, has just been awarded a $100,000 no-strings-attached MacArthur Foundation grant.

From the L. A. Times:

On Monday, news of who would be named the 2012 MacArthur Fellows leaked out early in reports by the Associated Press and elsewhere. Two writers are among the 23 artists, scientists and thinkers on the list: Junot Diaz and Dinaw Mengestu.

Diaz is the author of, most recently, the short story collection "This Is How You Lose Her," published in September. Mengestu's most recent work is the 2010 novel "How to Read the Air." Both are published by Riverhead.

Each author will receive a no-strings-attached "genius grant" of $500,000. All MacArthur Fellows are awarded $100,000 a year for five years.

More:  http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-jc-macarthur-genius-junot-diaz-dinaw-mengestu-20121001,0,2594121.story

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Junot Diaz Likes Character Flaws

Jack Rightmyer of the Schenectady Daily Gazette interviewed Junot Diaz on Sunday. The Pulitzer-winning fiction writer visits the Institute this coming Thursday.

“Characters who have all the answers and know exactly how to live and how to always do the right thing give off very little heat in a story,” he said in a recent phone interview.

“Most of us love ambivalence,” he said, “and my character Yunior is one of those dicey cats that will at times turn off and offend readers. He often makes the wrong choice, especially in relationships, but I still thought writing about him would be worth the risk because he’s an honest cat and there’s something refreshing about that.”  More.

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