News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Bard writer in residence Wyatt Mason looks at the Chicago-based artist who, for more than 40 years, has made it his mission to paint black figures into the canon.

If you missed Alan Cumming in conversation with WAMC's Joe Donahue at the Fisher Center on October 16, you can listen to the whole event on the Book Show.

Author Karan Mahajan has been selected to receive the Bard Fiction Prize for his novel The Association of Small Bombs. A finalist for the 2016 National Book Award, Mahajan’s masterful narrative tells the story of two Delhi families ripped apart by a small bombing in a marketplace. Woven around the story of the Khuranas and the Ahmeds is the gripping tale of Shockie, a Kashmiri bomb maker who has forsaken his own life for the independence of his homeland. Mahajan’s residency at Bard College is for the Fall 2017 semester, during which time he will continue his writing, meet informally with students, and give a public reading.

"Tender and artful ... a sophisticated satire, a gently spiritual celebration of life, a dark and thoroughly grim depiction of despair, a screwball comedy, a screwball tragedy."

After five years of preparation, the Sussman Rare Book Collection will open in the Stevenson Library on October 29 with such treasures as a 1556 copy of the Magna Carta.

In this essay from The Artists' and Writers' Cookbook, photographer An-My Lê remembers her grandmother making substitution pho after the family moved from Vietnam to Paris.

Libraries in the United States have been quietly waging a war in defense of free speech and privacy since the September 11 attacks, writes Francine Prose.

Professor Sante observes the indignation around Dylan's Nobel win, arguing that the writer deserves the award for using the power of words to change the time he inhabited.

On Monday, October 17, celebrated avant-garde fiction writer and literary critic Can Xue will read from her recent work at Bard College. English translations of her fiction include Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories, Five Spice Street, Vertical Motion, The Last Lover (winner of the Best Translated Book Award), and the forthcoming Frontier. She will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented as part of Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series and cosponsored by the Bard Program in Written Arts, takes place at 4 p.m. in Weis Cinema at the Bertelsmann Campus Center and will be followed by a Q&A. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required.

Brian Conn's story "The Guest" appears in the third volume of Undertow's Weird Fiction series, their "biggest and most ambitious volume to date."

Legendary performer Alan Cumming will talk with WAMC’s Joe Donahue about his new collection of photographs accompanied by autobiographical essays, You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams: My Life in Stories and Pictures, in which the actor, singer, writer, and man-about-town shares wildly entertaining real-life stories of louche late-night parties, backstage anecdotes, life in LA and New York, cross-country road trips with his beloved dog, Honey, and poignant memories of his life, loves, family, fellow actors, and friends. The event takes place on Sunday, October 16 at 3 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater. 

Dinaw Mengestu, professor of written arts and director of the Written Arts Program, has been named to the board of trustees of PEN America. The organization, which works at the intersection of literature and human rights, sought to broaden its leadership and address new challenges to expression with five new appointments to its board. Professor Mengestu is an award-winning Ethiopian-American author of three novels, most recently All Our Names. He joined the Bard faculty this fall.