Peter Matthiessen (1927 - 2014)

Peter Matthiessen, major American writer and former New York State Author under the auspices of
the New York State Writers Institute (1995-1997) has died at the age of 86.

Here's the New York Times obituary:   http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/books/peter-matthiessen-author-and-naturalist-is-dead-at-86.html?_r=0

 

More about Matthiessen as State Author appointed by then-Governor Mario Cuomo:

http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/matsnsa.html

Picture:  Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William Kennedy and UAlbany President Karen Hitchcock at the Writers Institute's 1995 New York State Author and Poet awards ceremony.

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Disguising Ithaca

Alison Lurie, our new State Author who will be inaugurated at Page Hall on Thursday 9/20, talks to the Gannett new service about disguising her hometown of Ithaca, NY and Cornell University, her longtime employer, in her novels:

“I called it a different name because if I wanted to move the buildings around, it wouldn’t be so difficult,” Lurie said. “And I didn’t want people to say, ‘What professor is this?’ Of course, they did anyway. But I tried so hard not to make it anyone I knew.”

More.

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Russell Banks at the Adirondack Center

Former New York State Author Russell Banks (2004-2006) will read from his acclaimed new novel about the lives of sex offenders at Paul Smiths College on Thursday Sept. 13th.

“Destined to be a canonical novel of its time... it delivers another of Banks’s wrenching, panoramic visions of American moral life, and this one very particular to the early 21st century... Banks, whose great works resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers to bear.” (Janet Maslin, New York Times )

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Best "School Book"

The New York Times asked its staffers to pick their favorite book ever about school settings.

Janet Maslin picked The War Between the Tates by the Writers Institute's newly-appointed New York State Author Alison Lurie.

“The War Between the Tates” is Alison Lurie’s funniest and most sharp-clawed novel. Published in 1974, and describing the step-by-step breakdown of a marriage between two academics, it is set at a place that’s called Corinth University but is instantly recognizable as Cornell. This book’s satirical bite is so sharp that when the Cornell Chronicle ran a piece about Lurie in 1998, the English department chair half-joked that “we professorial types worry that we might be satirized in a sequel” and expressed “gratitude” that her subsequent books had had other targets. Lurie concentrates on hostilities between Brian Tate, a self-satisfied political science professor, and Erica, his maddeningly stifled wife. At 40, Erica has a Radcliffe degree that has earned her the right to sit through faculty dinners and a husband who expects to be doted on. There are also two Tate teens, described tartly by Ms. Lurie as “nasty, brutish and tall.” The year is 1969. The Tates have hit the age of midlife crisis. It is almost inevitable for Brian to get involved with a student and for Erica to be galvanized by feminism as she fights back. Even with Vietnam War is its backdrop, artfully contrasted with the Tates’ form of combat, Lurie does her best strategic maneuvering on the home front. But it’s the depiction of all things Corinth that makes this tale of fraught academia so timeless and dead-on.

More picks in the NYT.

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