Lydia Davis to Visit JSC on Halloween!

Lydia Davis

The JSC Fall Authors Series continues!

On Monday, October 31, fiction writer and translator Lydia Davis will visit JSC to read from her work.  Lydia Davis is the author the novel The End of the Story and the story collections Break It Down, Almost No Memory, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, and Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007.  The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis was published in 2009 and, according to New Yorker book critic James Wood, "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, Donald Barthelme, or J. F. Powers."

Davis has received the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius Grant" for her fiction, and her accomplishments in translation are just as impressive.  Not only has she translated recent editions of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, but she has been named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.  Whoa.

WHEN:  Monday, October 31 (5:30pm)
WHERE:  Johnson State College / Stearns Performance Space

Free and open to the public!

More on Lydia Davis:

Read an interview with Lydia Davis from The Believer.

Listen to three audio interviews with Lydia Davis at KCRW's Bookworm:
     in 1998 (discussing and reading from Almost No Memory);
     in 2002 (discussing and reading from Samuel Johnson Is Indignant);
     and in 2007 (discussing and reading from Varieties of Disturbance).

Read another interview with Lydia Davis by the National Book Foundation, conducted after she was selected as a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.

And here is an interview with Davis at BOMB Magazine.

Read Davis's story "The Dreadful Mucamas" from the recent issue of Granta.

Read ten tiny stories by Davis, "Ten Stories from Flaubert," courtesy of The Paris Review.

Also from The Paris Review, here is Lydia Davis talking about translating the newest edition of Gustave Flaubert's novel of novels, Madame Bovary; and here is her follow-up.

And listen here to Davis's at-length discussion of translating Madame Bovary

PennSound presents here a trove of audio recordings of Lydia Davis's readings, interviews, and talks.

Read Davis's first-time translation of the Dutch (from The Mole and Other Very Short Animal Stories by A. L. Snijders) in Asymptote. 

Finally, below is a video inspired by a single sentence by Lydia Davis:

Writers Sign a Letter in Support of the Occupy Wall Street Movement

Check out Occupywriters.com for a list of (hundreds of?) writers who have signed a brief letter in support of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.  The list includes, to name but a few, John D'Agata, Robert Boswell, Jennifer Egan, Brian Evenson, Vivian Gornick, Mary Karr, Sam Lypsite, Bill McKibben, Rick Moody, Ann Patchett, Benjamin Percy, D. A. Powell, Francine Prose, George Sanders, Luc Sante, and many, many others.

Is your favorite writer on this list?  What does that mean? . . .

This Thursday at JSC: Poets David Lehman and Anna Maria Hong

The Johnson State College Authors Series is pleased host an evening of poetry with writers David Lehman and Anna Maria Hong this Thursday, Oct. 13, at 5:30 pm in the Stearns Performance Space.  This event is free and open to the public.

Read more about these authors below.

David Lehman

"David Lehman was born in New York City. He is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Yeshiva Boys( Scribner, 2009) and When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). Among his nonfiction books are A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs  (Nextbook / Schocken, 2009), The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor, 1999), The Perfect Murder ( Michigan, 2000), and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991). He edited Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present and The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present, which appeared from Scribner in 2003 and 2008, respectively. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006), a one-volume comprehensive anthology of poems from Anne Bradstreet to the present. Lehman teaches writing and literature in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City. He initiated The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and continues as the annual anthology's general editor. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989 and an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1990. He lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York."  -- David Lehman's Web site

Poet John Hollander has said this about Lehman:  "This increasingly impressive poet keeps reminding us that putting aside childish things can be done only wisely and well by keeping in touch with them, and that American life is best understood and celebrated by those who are, with Whitman, both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it."   

Here is a video of Lehman reading his "Poem for Obama."
Here is Lehman discussing and reading from his recent book Yeshiva Boys.

Here is Lehman discussing his Best American Poetry series.
Here is an interview with David Lehman on NPR's Morning Edition, in which he discusses updating The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006).

Here is Lehman's amusing "The Questions of Postmodernsim." 

Anna Maria Hong

From Anna Maria Hong's Institute Fellows page at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study:

Anna Maria Hong writes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and texts for collaborative works. Since 2005, she has been writing a series of sonnets in traditional English and Italian forms as well as more experimental hybrids and departures. Hong is interested in how rigorous form shapes expression and how language pushes back against constraints to create strange, unexpected content. To date, she has written about 60 sonnets, comprising the first of two collections, The Red Box. 



At Radcliffe, Hong will be working on her second volume of sonnets. The Glass Age is informed by two primary images: the hourglass and the glass ceiling/coffin. The first entails notions of linear and cyclical time, while the second concerns the sensing and shattering of invisible, but oddly durable, barriers. A third strand in the collection responds to glass artworks by artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Niki de Saint Phalle.



Hong has published her work in the American Book Review, CUE, Exquisite Corpse, Fairy Tale Review, Gargoyle Magazine, the International Examiner,jubilat, New Orleans Review, Poets & Writers, POOL, Quarterly West, theStranger, and other publications. She is the editor of Growing Up Asian American: An Anthology (William Morrow, 1993) and the recipient of residencies from Djerassi Resident Artists Program and Yaddo. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and a BA in philosophy from Yale University. She has taught creative writing at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and at the University of Washington Bothell.

Here is an interview with Anna Maria Hong by The Harvard Gazette.
Here is a poem by Anna Maria Hong called "Medea I / Device."

Read more about the Johnson State College Authors Series here.

The Death of Literature?

Over at Lapham's Quarterly, Curtis White explores how the divergence between literature as art and literature as commodity has contributed to the imminent death of both:

As far as I’m concerned, the book business deserves to die if for no other reason than that its business model is something out of the 1930s: send a bunch of loser Willy Loman’s out as “reps,” people who don’t read and don’t understand the books they sell, and have them place the books on consignment, just as if they were old chairs that you were trying to unload at the local consignment store. As far as the bookstores were concerned, they were mostly purchasing decoration for their stores, so that it at least looked like a place to buy books. The few books that actually made money—celebrity memoirs, confessions of failed politicians, moronic self-help tomes, and jokey piss-jobs about not running with scissors—were profitably located on a few tables at the front of the store. Everything else was just ambience.

Bad as this was and remains, the really fatal flaw in this system is that it allows stores to buy new titles not with money but with the return of all the books you sent them months ago that they never sold, and never really had much interest in selling. How could they sell them? No one working in the store read books, and they were no more capable of recommending a challenging literary title than they were of shaping your investment portfolio or diagnosing a kidney complaint. Every few years in the ‘80s and ‘90s, B&N would take some sort of national warehouse purgative and back would come books you thought you’d sold months and years earlier. (I once watched in appalled amazement as two-hundred copies of a backlist title that had only sold maybe five-hundred to begin with was returned by Barnes and Noble five years after it was first released. I had to wonder, did we ever sell any copies of this book?) The best that most of our books could hope for was a short shelf life of four to six months, a single lonely spine out in an acre of shelves and books.

Now even that stupid and insidious racket seems to be failing.

With the death of each new generation of booksellers, each failed “business model,” the independent literary writer/poet/publisher wants to say, “Good riddance, they had it coming,” only to be mortified by how much worse the thing is that takes its place.¹ In ten years, for people raised by computers (and by that I mean everyone), buying a book will mean buying an ebook from Amazon, Google, or maybe Barnes and Noble, if it survives. I asked John O’Brien, the legendary publisher of Dalkey Archive Press, what he thought, and he said this:

The greatest threat to book publishing in the United States right now is Amazon. Through various spin-offs, they have become a publisher, and this means that they are moving towards becoming both a distributor of books and a publisher, and no book publisher will be able to compete. In the future (and I am sure this is the plan) Amazon wants to control all distribution and all publishing. This is a very scary prospect: that a single company will have such power to determine what will be published and on what terms. Once the ‘Amazon plan’ is realized, they will be able to charge whatever they want to charge and will of course be able to decide what the best-sellers will be. They will have gotten themselves into the position of making such decisions because they will be the only game in town.

Even a year ago, O’Brien would have sounded paranoid to most people, but then came this article in the August 17, 2011 edition of the New York Timesbusiness section,“Amazon Set to Publish Pop Author.” 

Amazon moved aggressively Tuesday to fulfill its new ambition to publish books as well as sell them, announcing that it had signed Timothy Ferriss, the wildly popular self-help guru for young men.

Amazon has been publishing books for several years, but its efforts went up several notches in visibility when it brought in the longtime New York editor and agent Laurence Kirshbaum three months ago as head of Amazon Publishing.

To read the rest of White's article, click here . . .

Writers on Their Last Supper

Check out the The New York Times Magazine "Food & Drink Issue," where Bill Buford writes about eating warm pig's blood:

"My task was to keep it moving with my hand. I stirred, and a hundred pieces of string thickened against my fingers. I stirred and stirred and seemed to become aware of everything at once. The blood up to my armpit, the smell of the animal, the low wheezes of its last breath, the clear winter light, the color of the sky, the dirt under my knees, the smoke from a fire that had been made to heat water in an old-fashioned cast-iron stove for cooking the boudin noir. That's what the blood was for, blood sausages that would be cooked to a weightless custard.

The strings dissolved, the blood was ready. A friend gave me a ladle, and I dipped into the bucket, and drank it, a little sloppily, aware that I now had a red moustache."

Also, lit blogger Maud Newton discusses rattlesnake:

"Many compare it with chicken, some say it's like alligator and campers in the Southwest, where it's most often eaten, call it desert whitefish. In fact, rattlesnake tastes, at least when breaded and fried, like a sinewy, half-starved tilapia."

And Leslie Robarge asks chefs and writers, "What Would You Order for Your Last Supper?"  Here are a few of the responses:

"A piece of bluefin tuna sashimi, some Argentinian beef, chocolate from Bernachon in Lyon, half a dozen local oysters and clams. A P.B.R. in a can (for the clams and oysters), white and red burgundy wine with everything else."
DAVE PASTERNACK, chef and co-owner, Esca

"Cheeseburger with a fried egg. My wife's homemade chocolate- chip cookies. Copious amounts of red wine. Enjoyed in the company of family and friends and accompanied by the Grateful Dead played very loud."
WYLIE DUFRESNE, chef and co-owner, WD-50

"New England clam chowder from the Seafood Shoppe in Wainscott, N.Y.; foie gras with toast from La Grenouille; Nate 'n Al's hot dog; strip steak from SW Steakhouse; duck from the Four Seasons; fried chicken from The Dutch; corn on the cob, hearts of lettuce with Roquefort, onion rings, Bubby's cherry pie, the unbelievable grapefruit dessert from Boulud Sud."
NORA EPHRON, author

Swedish Poet Tomas Tranströmer Awarded Nobel Prize

Tomas Tranströmer

The 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature went to Tomas Tranströmer, a Swedish poet who is credited as one of Sweden's most important post-World War II writers.  Below, courtesy of Bookforum (and via the publishers New Directions) are three poems selected from Tranströmer's The Great Enigma:

Translated by Robin Fulton

Two Cities

Each on its side of a strait, two cities
the one blacked out, occupied by the enemy.
In the other the lamps are burning.
The bright shore hypnotizes the dark one.

I swim out in a trance
on the glittering dark waters.
A dull tuba-blast penetrates.
It’s a friend’s voice, take up your grave and walk.

The Light Streams In

Outside the window, the long beast of spring
the transparent dragon of sunlight
rushes past like an endless
suburban train—we never got a glimpse of its head.

The shoreline villas shuffle sideways
they are proud as crabs.
The sun makes the statues blink.

The raging sea of fire out in space
is transformed to a caress.
The countdown has begun.

Night Journey

Thronging under us. The trains.
Hotel Astoria trembles.
A glass of water at the bedside
shines in the tunnels.

He dreamt he was a prisoner on Svalbard.
The planet turned rumbling.
Glittering eyes walked over the ice fields.
The beauty of miracles existed.

Who Will Win the Next Nobel Prize in Literature?

Syrian Poet Adonis, seen as a front-runner for the the next Nobel,
was also featured in the Fall 2010 issue of JSC's Green Mountains Review  

The Los Angeles Times offers a guide to "Handicapping the Nobel Prize in Literature," providing odds and possible criteria for the next winner of what is unquestionably the highest literary honor in the world.  Here are some of some of the L.A. Times' picks:


 1. Adonis - 81 year-old Syrian poet.


2. Thomas Tranströmer: An 80-year-old Swedish poet, writer and translator. His poetry has been      published in the U.S. by independent presses Greywolf and New Directions.


3. Thomas Pynchon: The 74-year-old American author was awarded the National Book Award in 1974 for his novel "Gravity's Rainbow," a book that failed to be awarded the Pulitzer in a judging controversy. Known as a major figure in postmodern American fiction, the famously reclusive Pynchon mixes sometimes grim, sometimes slapstick humor with heady concepts and rocket science. His other works include  "Mason & Dixon," "V.," "Against the Day," "Inherent Vice" and "The Crying of Lot 49."


4-5. Assia Djebar: The 75-year-old Algerian native was an activist for Algerian independence and remains a strong feminist advocate. She has moved between Algeria and France, taking academic appointments in both countries, and in the last decade has been on the faculty at New York University in the U.S. In 2005, she was named the first North African member of the French Academy. She has written more than a dozen novels in French; translations include "Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade" (1993), "So Vast the Prison" (1999) and "The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry" (2010).


4-5. Péter Nádas: Nadas, who will turn 69 on Oct. 14, is a Hungarian novelist and essayist who has lived in Germany. In early years, when he was working as a journalist and some of his work was held under ban, secret police offered to approve a travel application he'd made if he became an informant; he declined. Nádas' novel "A Book of Memories," published in English in 1997, was hailed by Susan Sontag as postwar Europe's greatest novel. His next novel, "Parallel Stories," which clocks in at more than 1,000 pages, will be published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in late October.


6. Ko Un: The 78-year-old Korean poet spent 10 years as a Buddhist monk, although The Nation notes that he was also a "drunkard, teacher, political activist." In the '70s and '80s he was imprisoned for his activism against South Korea's military regime. He is said by some to be Korea's greatest living poet. He has written many works; "Ten Thousand Lives" and "Songs for Tomorrow," published by Green Integer Press, are among those that appear in English.


7-8. Haruki Murakami: The 62-year-old Japanese author published his first novel in 1979; he is one of Japan's favorite living writers. Considered a significant postmodernist, he has won a number of major international writing awards, including the Kafka Prize from the Czech Republic, Israel's Jerusalem Prize, Japan's Asahi Prize and the Frank O'Connor Short Story Prize from Ireland. His novels include "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World," "Kafka on the Shore" and the memoir "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running." His new book, the 1,000-plus-page "1Q84," will be published in the U.S. in October.


7-8. Les Murray: Australian poet, critic, translator and editor Les Murray will turn 73 on Oct. 17. Considered a leading poet of the Commonwealth, he has sometimes taken critical and political positions that go against the grain. He has won major international poetry prizes, including the European Petrarch Prize, the T.S. Eliot Award and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. His recent works include the poetry collections "Taller When Prone," "The Biplane Houses," and "Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression," all published in the U.S. by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.


9. Mircea Cărtărescu: The 55-year-old Romanian poet is considered one of that country's leading literary figures. He writes and teaches in Bucharest and is a member of the European Cultural Parliament. He has published many books but just a few have found a home in the U.S. His short-story collection "Nostalgia" was published in the U.S. by New Directions in 2005; another collection, and a poetry trilogy, "Blinding (Orbitor)" will be published by Archipelago in 2012.


Time permitting between now and the Nobel, [The Los Angeles Times will] get to those farther down on the list, including the eight writers tied for 10th place: Antonio Lobo Antunes, John Banville, Don Delillo, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, K. Satchidanandan and Colm Toibin.


What about the rest of you?  Who's your choice for the next Nobel?