News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Writer in Residence Teju Cole and Bard Fiction Prize winner Laura van den Berg talk "reader's block," genre, favorite reading spots, and more.

The election of Klaus Johannis is nothing less than an "electoral earthquake" for Romania, writes Professor Manea. (PDF Download)

Authors Teju Cole and Salman Rushdie cohost an evening of their work at New York City's Symphony Space on December 10, featuring Blythe Danner '65 as one of the performers.

Nuruddin Farah's Hiding in Plain Sight, Porochista Khakpour's The Last Illusion, and Francine Prose's Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 are among the year's best fiction.

The Human Rights Project at Bard College presents a public conversation between Nuruddin Farah and Mark Danner to discuss Farah’s new critically acclaimed novel Hiding in Plain Sight. Farah, who just won a Lifetime Achievement Literary Award from the South African Literary Awards, has been hailed as “the most important African novelist to emerge in the past twenty-five years” by The New York Review of Books. This event will take place on Monday, November 17, from 6 pm to 7:30 pm in the Multipurpose Room of the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College.

The French government has declared books an "essential good." What does that say about French literary culture compared to that of the United States?

The Last Illusion draws from the Persian Book of Kings, in which a young man is raised by a bird and becomes a warrior. In Khakpour's novel he is raised by his mother in a cage as a bird.