Is Twitter a Literary Form?

Recent Institute visitor Teju Cole discusses the limits and possibilities of Twitter as a literary form in the "6th floor blog" of the New York Times:

"When the merits of Twitter are debated, one sentiment invariably is at the top of the con column: 140 characters are seldom enough to express the full weight of an idea. Or at least an idea that’s worth expressing."

"People have found ways around this: conjoined tweets, live-tweeting, etc. … The novelist Teju Cole expanded on this theme on Wednesday, when he posted an entire short story via tweet. Yes, that has been done before. But Cole’s project was different, because the individual tweets were posted not by him, but by his followers, and then @TejuCole retweeted them in chronological order to form a sort of quilted story."

More in the New York Times:  http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/teju-cole-puts-story-telling-to-the-twitter-test/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

More about Teju Cole's visit in February 2012: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/cole_teju12.html

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Stig Dagerman Celebration Tonight

Impressive praise blurbs grace the cover of Sleet, a new collection of stories in English translation by Swedish author Stig Dagerman, translated by former Writers Institute grad assistant Steven Hartman. The book also features an introduction by National Book Award winner Alice McDermott. The collection will be available for sale tonight at Page Hall at a celebration of Stig Dagerman's life and works, featuring films and readings, and a discussion with Steve Hartman and Lo Dagerman, Stig's daughter.

Picture: Steve Hartman

More about tonight's event:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/dagerman_hartman13.html

Dagerman wrote with beautiful objectivity. Instead of emotive phrases, he uses a choice of facts, like bricks, to construct an emotion. --Graham Greene

An imagination that appeals to an unreasonable degree of sympathy is precisely what makes Dagerman s fiction so evocative. Evocative not, as one might expect, of despair, or bleakness, or existential angst, but of compassion, fellow-feeling, even love. --from the preface by Alice McDermott

Stig Dagerman writes with the tension that belongs to emergency—deliberately, precisely, breathlessly. To read Dagerman is to read with your whole body—lungs, heart, viscera, as well as mind. At once remote and intimate in tone, these works by one of the great twentieth-century writers come fully to life in a remarkable translation by Steven Hartman.
—Siri Hustvedt, author of The Summer Without Men

Stig Dagerman s fearless, moving stories should be placed alongside the short fiction of such luminaries as James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver. You ll find yourself holding your breath in wonder as you read, grateful to Dagerman (and Steven Hartman) for the gift of these stories. --Edward Schwarzschild, author of The Family Diamond

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Stories About Women in Science

Janet Maslin reviews Andrea Barrett's Archangel, a new collection of short pieces of historical fiction about the struggles of women scientists.

"This is a book full of strong women..... [Barrett's] stories work as both fiction and as philosophy of science. And she need do no grandstanding to advance her belief in unstoppable progress. But this book does offer a powerfully human sense of the struggle it takes for new ideas to dislodge old ones.

Barrett visited the Writers Institute in 2007: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/barrett.html

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Short Is Big for Local Writer

Paul Grondahl writes about Lydia Davis in the Times Union, with statements from Writers Institute
director Don Faulkner, and fellow UAlbany faculty member Lynne Tillman:

"She is a unique fiction writer who writes very short stories that are highly reflective, kind of ironic and sometimes comical. They play with the very concept of what storytelling is," said Donald Faulkner, director of the New York State Writers Institute at UAlbany.

"She is an excellent editor, great teacher and sympathetic reader who has helped a lot of young writers," Faulkner said. "She's not a prima donna on any level."

Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Short-is-big-for-local-writer-4544778.php#ixzz2UDyIRcwD

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Junot Diaz reviewed in the New York Times

"Junot Díaz writes in an idiom so electrifying and distinct it’s practically an act of aggression, at once alarming and enthralling, even erotic in its assertion of sudden intimacy...."

Read more of Leah Hager Cohen's review of Diaz's This is How You Lose Her in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review.

Diaz visits on Thursday Oct. 4th.

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On Men and Violence

Read Mary Gaitskill's short story, "The Other Place," about men and obsessions with violence in last year's Valentine's Day issue of the New Yorker:

"My son, Douglas, loves to play with toy guns. He is thirteen. He loves video games in which people get killed. He loves violence on TV, especially if it’s funny. How did this happen? The way everything does, of course. One thing follows another, naturally."

More.

Gaitskill will share the stage with poet Tom Healy, tonight, Wednesday, July 25th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

Click here for more events in the series. All are free and open to the general public.

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An Army of Storytellers

"...[Storytelling] is important for the very idea of understanding -- for people to understand each other, other countries, other languages, maybe even themselves a little better. Fulbright wasn't founded in 1946 to send people on vacation; it was founded to bridge communities, to build ties, to share knowledge, to solve some of our pressing global challenges, and to work for peace."

Poet Tom Healy, who shares the stage with Mary Gaitskill tonight in Saratoga, was appointed Chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board by President Obama in 2011. He wrote earlier this month in the Huffington Post of his mission to encourage Fulbright scholars to take storytelling seriously.

Read more in the Huffington Post.

Healy grew up on a dairy farm in Mount Vision, NY. His 2009 poetry collection, What the Right Hand Knows was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry He will share the stage with fiction writer Mary Gaitskill, tonight, Wednesday, July 25th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

Click here for more events in the series. All are free and open to the general public.

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Upcoming Events

The final week of the New York State Writers Institute at Skidmore College in Saratoga will feature Jamaica Kincaid and Henri Cole tonight 7/24, Mary Gaitskill and Tom Healy tomorrow 7/25, Rick Moody and Francine Prose Thursday 7/26, and "Writers on the Presidential Election" Friday 7/27, featuring James Miller and The Nation's Katha Pollitt (pictured here).

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

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Rensselaerville Festival of Writers, July 26-29

The 2012 Rensselaerville Festival of Writers will feature Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell, Writers Institute friend and retiring New York State Legislator Jack McEneny, UAlbany English professor Tomas Urayoan Noel, Lizz Winstead who co-created the Daily Show with John Stewart, and many others.

No doubt there will also be spontaneous tributes to Rensselaerville's best-loved resident, the late Andy Rooney, who passed away last November.

Other attractions include hiking in the Huyck preserve and the village itself.

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Family Dysfunction: Literature for Thanksgiving

The literary magazine Ploughshares serves up a banquet of dysfunctional family literature for your Thanksgiving gathering in its November issue.

Lydia Davis, New York State Writers Institute Writing Fellow, provides one of the appetizers:

"If your taste for dysfunction veers toward the quietly lethal, I urge readers to pick up a copy of anything by Lydia Davis. 'Meat, My Husband,' which appears in her Collected Stories, and originally in Almost No Memory, is the ideal amuse-bouche for a family gathering." More.

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