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
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Exterminating Angel: "Like rats in an overpopulation study"
Monday, October 28, 2013
Douglas Bauer on Marriage, Aging, Life, Death
Douglas Bauer, who visits the Writers Institute tomorrow, 10/29, to present his new book, What Happens Next, Matters of Life and Death, is interviewed by Elizabeth Floyd Mair in the Times Union.
Q: What was the most surprising thing that you learned in the course of writing this book?
A: That I could write it. Until now, all my nonfiction has been about other people. Or it's concerned itself with literary matters. And I struggled in this book to find a balance between what seemed necessary to reveal about myself and my great reluctance to reveal anything, however important to the narrative.
More in the TU: http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/Focus-on-marriage-aging-4923207.php
More about Bauer's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/bauer_douglas13.html
"Essayist Douglas Bauer examines future exquisitely"
Douglas Bauer's new collection of essays about life and death and his Iowa farm boyhood is reviewed in his hometown newspaper, the eastern Iowa Gazette, October 27, 2013:
"While it’s common to wonder what happens after we die, it’s not as common — or as pleasing a discussion at a party, say — to speculate on how we will age and eventually pass."
"However, this question posed itself quite plainly to author and essayist Douglas Bauer when, in his early sixties, he found himself needing a series of routine surgical procedures. As he was waking up from the first of two cataract surgeries, Bauer received word that his mother passed away.This experience was the catalyst for Bauer’s moving collection of personal essays, 'What Happens Next?' (University of Iowa Press)."
Read more in The Gazette: http://thegazette.com/2013/10/27/essayist-douglas-bauer-examines-future-exquisitely/
Read more about Douglas Bauer's event tomorrow, Tuesday, 10/28: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/bauer_douglas13.html
Friday, October 25, 2013
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
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Goli Taraghi in the Times Union
Susan Comninos interviews Goli Taraghi, major voice in Iranian literature who visits Albany today.
"An intriguing time warp exists in the fiction of Persian expatriate author Goli Taraghi. While many fear rising nuclear capability in today's Iran, Taraghi, 74, remains gripped by her homeland's past. Decades after the 1979 revolution that toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Taraghi, in her new collection of short stories, "The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons" (W.W. Norton, Oct. 23, 2013), continues to chronicle the lives of exiles like herself, who fled to Western countries from the Islamic Republic. For Taraghi, their exodus is a trauma that never ended, but keeps getting painfully re-enacted."
More in the Times Union: http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/Expatriate-author-feels-pull-of-home-4904546.php
More about Goli Taraghi's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/taraghi_goli13.html
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Profile of Luis Gutierrez in Rolling Stone
Congressman Luis Gutierrez, Latino civil rights leader who visits Albany tomorrow to talk about his new memoir, Still Dreaming, is profiled and interviewed by Ed Morales in a recent issue of Rolling Stone:
"I wish a had a nickel for every time I had to write 'I will not talk in class' on the blackboard in grade school," says Gutiérrez, 59, calling from his office in Washington. "Some people are born talkers, and I wrote this book as though you were having a conversation with me." Fully conversant in Spanglish, Gutiérrez switches from Chicago street mode to island Spanish easily because of his family's move back to Puerto Rico while he was still in high school. While the transition was a little awkward – island locals were quick to call him a "gringo" because of his imperfect Spanish – he learned something important about himself there.
More in Rolling Stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/luis-gutierrez-congress-rebel-with-a-cause-20131010
More about Gutierrez's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/gutierrez_luis13.html
National Book Award Finalists
Finalists for the 2013 National Book Award have been announced.
Among them are five past visitors to the New York State Writers Institute: James McBride and George Saunders for Fiction; Jill Lepore for Nonfiction; and Frank Bidart and Lucie Brock-Broido for Poetry.
The awards ceremony is scheduled for November 20.
Full list in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/17/business/media/finalists-for-national-book-awards-announced.html?_r=0
Picture: Jill Lepore.