Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
"
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS, MAJOR AMERICAN FICTION WRITER, AUTHOR OF FICTION ROOTED IN HER WEST VIRGINIA GIRLHOOD, TO OPEN THE WRITERS INSTITUTE’S SPRING SERIES JANUARY 27, 2009
CALENDAR LISTING:
Jayne Anne Phillips, major American novelist and short story writer, author of fiction rooted in her West Virginia girlhood, will discuss her work on Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 8:00 p.m. in the Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. Earlier that same day at 4:15 p.m. the author will present an informal seminar in Assembly Hall, Campus Center, on the uptown campus. The events are sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute and are free and open to the public.
Albany, NY – Jayne Anne Phillips, author of fiction rooted in her West Virginia girlhood, “stepped out of the ranks of her generation as one of its most gifted writers,” averred Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, adding that “Her quick, piercing tales of love and loss [show] a keen love of language, and a rare talent of illuminating the secret core of ordinary lives with clearsighted unsentimentality.”
Phillips is the author most recently of Lark and Termite (2009), a novel about the members of a West Virginia family struggling to survive during the 1950s at the time of the Korean War. The characters include Lark, a teenage girl forced by circumstances to assume the responsibilities of womanhood, and Termite, her profoundly disabled younger brother who, despite his impairments, enjoys a vivid inner life. The novel also follows the experiences of Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, amid the carnage and turmoil on the Korean peninsula.
In advance praise, novelist Junot Díaz called the new book, “extraordinary… luminous… It is an astounding feat of the imagination… the best novel I've read this year.” Alice Munro said, “This novel is cut like a diamond, with such sharp authenticity and bursts of light.” “New York Times” reviewer Michiko Kakutani called the novel “intricate” and “deeply felt” and described the characters as “so indelible, so intimately drawn, that they threaten to move in and take up permanent residence in the reader’s mind.”
Phillips’ earlier books include the short story collection “Black Tickets” (1979), and the novels “Machine Dreams” (1984), “Shelter” (1994) and “MotherKind” (2000).
Phillips’ first novel, “Machine Dreams,” tells the story of how a West Virginia family weathers the major events of the 20th century, from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War. Novelist Robert Stone said, “‘Machine Dreams’, in its wisdom and its compassionate, utterly unsentimental rendering of the American condition, will rank as one of the great books of [the] decade.”
“MotherKind” explores the spiritual education of a woman who must become the caretaker of her terminally ill mother during the early months of a young marriage and after the birth of her first child. The “Time” magazine reviewer said, “A passionate but indirect evocation of loss . . . Phillips concentrates on the day-to-day details of ordinary existence suddenly afflicted with extraordinary pressures and the conflicting tugs of joy and grief.”
Jayne Anne Phillips is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Bunting Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and both the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.
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"Jayne Anne Phillips's intricate, deeply felt new novel reverberates with echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac, McCullers and Michael Herr's war reporting, and yet it fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and utterly original."
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Ann Savage, inventor of the '40s femme fatale role, died on Dec. 27th at the age of 87. Savage is the star of Detour, Edgar G. Ulmer's classic low-budget 1945 film which (along with Ulmer's Bluebeard) will kick of the New York State Writers Institute's 2009 Classic Film Series. In the film 
The New York Times:
“It’s actually a showcase role,” [her manager] Kent Adamson said. “Neal and Savage really reversed the traditional male-female roles of the time. She’s vicious and predatory. She’s been called a harpy from hell, and in the film, too, she’s very sexually aggressive, and he’s very, very passive.”
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
--William Shakespeare, “Macbeth,” Act V, Scene v
Jayne Anne Phillips pays homage to fellow Southerner William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in her remarkable new novel, Lark and Termite (January 2009), the story of a West Virginia family struggling to survive at the time of the Korean War. Both novels feature four points of view, stream-of-consciousness narratives, and mentally impaired characters with special gifts of vision and understanding.
Writing in the New York Review of Books, Lorraine Adams said, “Phillips reinvigorates and transforms the Faulknerian infrastructure. Female voices, not the chorus of brothers Jason and Quentin, dominate in Lark and Termite…. While Faulkner chronicled the decay of the South through its men, Phillips adumbrates the nobility of Appalachia, of Korean refugees, of the least of us, by taking us into the “shaky territory” of women….”
Note: Fiction writer Jayne Anne Phillips will visit the Writers Institute on Tuesday, January 27, 2009. She will hold an informal workshop at 4:15 PM in Assembly Hall, Campus Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus, 1400 Washington Ave. In the evening, at 8 PM, Phillips will read from and discuss her new novel Lark and Termite in the Recital Hall of the Performing Arts Center on the uptown campus.
