News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Writer in Residence Wyatt Mason reviews Moroccan-born author Laila Lalami's new novel, The Moor's Account.

Writer in Residence Francine Prose discusses her latest novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, as well as love, storytelling, and how to read like a writer.

"Many writers—myself included—attempt to solve this quandary by telling themselves that writing truthfully and well, or trying to write truthfully and well, is itself a political act," writes Prose.

Bard College professor Robert Kelly has been appointed Dutchess County’s first poet laureate. Kelly will read two poems at the State of the County Address, which County Executive Marc Molinaro is scheduled to deliver on Wednesday, January 27 at 5:30 p.m. at the Bardavon 1869 Opera House in Poughkeepsie.

Robert Kelly, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature and codirector of the Written Arts Program, has been named Dutchess County’s first poet laureate.

Bard MFA alumna Robin Coste Lewis discusses her book Voyage of the Sable Venus, which won the National Book Award last year.

Eight Bard alumni/ae are involved in the production of Bieber Bathos Elegy, created by Felix Bernstein '13, which will premiere at the Whitney Museum in New York City on January 15. This hybrid work by New York–based artist, poet, and writer Bernstein combines musical performance, poetry, cabaret drag, and opera to explore the concept of bathos—the failure to achieve pathos—and illuminate issues of identity and persona through the character of Justin Bieber. The work is directed by Gabe Rubin '14 with assistant director Clara Lipfert MFA '18, composed by Rron Karahoda '13, with production design by George Dupont '14 and sound design by Cammisa Buerhaus MFA '18, and features musical performances by Leila Bordreuil '13 and Lazar Bozic '14.

John Ashbery tells the story of his lifelong fascination with French culture, and how the arts, literature, and people of that country influenced his work as writer and translator.

"Luc Sante’s fascinating guide to the squalid, disorderly, dank, thrilling, dangerous underside of the Paris of the past makes for a suitably sprawling book."

Thomas Keenan, director of Bard's Human Rights Program, comments on the recently released high-quality drone footage of Islamic State targets in Iraq taken by the Italian Air Force.

Stephen Shore is one of a number of artists who have been successful at conventional photography and now use Instagram as a sort of extra studio, writes Teju Cole.

Layli Long Soldier has been awarded a 2015 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She resides in Tsaile, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation and is an English faculty member at Diné College.

Stacy Schiff reviews Letters to Véra, Vladimir Nabokov's letters to his wife, edited and translated from the Russian by Bard professor Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd.

Luc Sante's The Other Paris is Times Higher Education's Book of the Week. "Beneath a bourgeois veneer is a secret history of defunct jobs and fascinating lives."

Hudson Valley Magazine interviewed Bard alumna and La Voz editor Mariel Fiori for their December Women in Business issue.

Logue's Homer, "because of its radical departures, gets us closer to the original than many more defensibly 'faithful' translations have ever managed."

At 15 years old, Bard writer in residence Francine Prose took a job in Bellevue Hospital’s morgue, where her doctor parents hoped she would turn her interests from writing to science.

Conjunctions:65, Sleights of Hand—the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College—gathers a wide spectrum of essays, fiction, and poetry on the subject of deception, exploring a world in which truth is a most fragile, elaborate, and mercurial thing. Edited by Conjunctions editor, novelist, and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, Sleights of Hand includes new work from such leading contemporary writers as James Morrow, Laura van den Berg, Porochista Khakpour, Can Xue, Joyce Carol Oates, Edie Meidav, Eleni Sikelianos, Terese Svoboda, Yannick Murphy, Peter Straub, and Paul West, among others.

Professor Ian Buruma has been described as “one of the few remaining ‘public intellectuals’."

These famous comic book authors become the heroes of their own stories in upcoming memoirs.

For the first time, the Museum of Modern Art and the Performa art biennial have co-commissioned a work: There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed, by Bard alumna Juliana Huxtable.

Author Alexandra Kleeman has been selected to receive the annual Bard Fiction Prize for 2016. The prize, established in 2001 by Bard College to encourage and support promising young fiction writers, consists of a $30,000 cash award and appointment as writer in residence for one semester. Kleeman is receiving the prize for her debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (Harper 2015).  

Inspired by the short biographies in the Library of America's 19th-century American poetry collections, Luc Sante offers "a tribute ... this collective portrait, like an overlay of photographic transparencies."

On Monday, November 9, Brian Evenson—the celebrated and controversial author of Altmann’s Tongue, The Wavering Knife, The Open Curtain, Last Days, Windeye, and other books—will read from his work at Bard College. “There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson,” says writer George Saunders. Evenson will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented as part of Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, takes place at 2:30 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.

On November 5, celebrated poet Jennifer Moxley will read from her award-winning work at Bard College. The reading is presented by the John Ashbery Poetry Series. The Iowa Review writes that Moxley’s “poems make room for thinking, for dreams, and for silence as they manage and contextualize space both public and private ... [They seem] to ask: Can we take the detritus of living and make song of it? What would that song be like? Would it be song? How do we begin to make it? What would stand in its way?” Introduced by Ann Lauterbach, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard, and followed by a Q&A, this event takes place at 6:00 p.m. in Bard Hall. It is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

Join a public conversation on November 7 between Neil Gaiman, Bard professor in the arts, and Armistead Maupin, the best-selling writer and activist, as they discuss their heroes Charles Dickens and Christopher Isherwood, the craft of storytelling, and many other subjects. The program takes place on Saturday, November 7 at 7:30 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater of Bard's Fisher Center. Maupin is the author of 11 novels, including the nine-volume Tales of the City series, which Salon calls “perhaps the most sublime piece of popular literature America has ever produced.”

Widely acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates, recipient of the National Humanities Medal and National Book Award, will read from "Walking Wounded," a new, unpublished story commissioned especially for its world premiere at this event on Monday, October 26. Booklist wrote, in praise of her short-story collection Lovely, Dark, Deep, "Oates, one of few writers who achieves excellence in both the novel and the short story, has more than two dozen story collections to her name and she continues to inject new, ambushing power into the form. Oates’s stories seethe and blaze." Oates will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented as part of Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, takes place at 3:00 p.m. in Olin Hall. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required.

"Austrian and Curato turn the simple wedding of two worms into a three-ring circus that slyly turns the whole controversy over same-sex versus heterosexual marriage on its head."

Novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow and acclaimed guitarist Alex Skolnick present A Bestiary, a live collaborative performance of Morrow’s lyrical prose pieces about animals real and imaginary—from snake to mongoose, unicorn to whale, elephant to glugfish. Set to Skolnick’s original compositions, ranging from jazz to rock to country to world music, this reading of A Bestiary unites the written word with guitar virtuosity in unexpected, magical ways.  Now comic, now tragic, A Bestiary explores the animal kingdom as well as the human condition it mirrors.

On Thursday, October 8, poet Anna Moschovakis, a founding editor of Ugly Duckling Presse and winner of the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award, will give a reading at Bard College. Author of I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone, You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, and the forthcoming They and We Will Get into Trouble for This, Moschovakis will be introduced by Ann Lauterbach, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature. This event, presented by the John Ashbery Poetry Series, takes place in Bard Hall at 6:00 p.m. It is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. Books will be available for sale and signing from Oblong Books & Music.

Bryan Doerries's Outside the Wire theater company presents performance projects at schools, hospitals, and prisons around the world that engage audiences in difficult conversations.

Professor Joseph Luzzi turned to Dante Aligheri’s The Divine Comedy in the wake of a tragic loss.

On Monday, October 5, Bard College will present a talk by financial journalist and editor Carol Loomis to inaugurate the John J. Curran ’75 Lectures in Journalism series. Loomis is the former senior editor-at-large of Fortune magazine, and the coiner of the term “hedge fund.” The editor of Warren Buffett's annual shareholder letter, she has been recognized by the New York Times for her success in battling gender stereotypes within the financial-services industry, having started her career in the 1950s as one of only two female reporters at Fortune. The Reformed Broker calls Loomis “a lion of financial journalism,” while ValueWalk celebrates her as “without doubt, the greatest business writer of all time.”

David Brin has been named the first annual National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow. Brin, an American scientist, award-winning author of science fiction, and leading commentator on the world’s most pressing technological trends, is in residence at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College from Monday, October 5, to Sunday, October 25. As part of Brin’s fellowship, he will mentor selected Bard students on their fiction and nonfiction writing. Brin will also offer a number of lectures and discussions during his residency at Bard. This new annual fellowship has been made possible through an NEH Challenge Grant.

On Thursday, September 24, at 8 p.m., the New York State Writers Institute will celebrate Bard's provocative, innovative literary journal Conjunctions with a reading by Bradford Morrow (Conjunctions editor, Bard literature professor, and Bard Center Fellow) and contributing editors Ann Lauterbach (Bard’s David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature) and Peter Straub. The reading will take place at the Recital Hall at the Performing Arts Center on the University at Albany’s uptown campus, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, New York.

On Monday, September 28, Bard alumna Allie Cashel ’13 will read from a memoir of her experience with chronic Lyme disease, Suffering the Silence: Chronic Lyme Disease in an Age of Denial. The reading is presented by the Written Arts and Biology Programs. A living portrait of chronic Lyme disease and its patients’ struggles for recognition and treatment, Suffering the Silence, originally Allie Cashel’s Senior Project, is now a full-length memoir that details Cashel’s own experience with chronic Lyme and shares the stories of a number of other patients from around the world. Introduced by Mary Caponegro ’78, Bard literature professor, and followed by a Q&A, this event takes place at 7:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center.

On Tuesday, September 22, at 7 p.m., Norman Rush, the National Book Award winner and author of Whites, Mating, Mortals, and Subtle Bodies, will read from his work at Bard College. "Rush’s characters want to fall in love, to laugh and enjoy themselves. Their quirks, opinions, compulsions . . . keep us engrossed—along with the clarity and precision of Rush's sentences, the freshness of his observations," wrote Francine Prose in her review of Subtle Bodies in The New York Review of Books.

Benjamin Barron '15, who cofounded the new fashion and culture publication ALL-IN with fellow alum Allison Littrell '14, tells us why he's not crazy and why print is more important than ever.

"I had found that birds were the perfect antidote to gloomy thoughts about the passage of time," writes Rogers, "and to the low-level but constant fury about how messed up the world is."

Spahr's new collection of verse and prose asks, "what it means to remain a disillusioned opponent of capitalism, a not-quite-despondent environmental observer and an anxious parent today."

"The Brink is so funny, so inventive—and so fearless in what it has to say about geopolitics," writes Bard writer in residence Francine Prose.

"There are certain photographs that seem to have been pulled out of the world of dreams." Teju Cole goes to São Paulo in search of René Burri's "Men on a Rooftop."

The association of prominent literary writers and editors interviews Ian Buruma, winner of a recent PEN Award for his essay collection Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War.

Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose addresses the nebulous nature of the literary canon and argues for "enlarging the guest list."

From the first airplane flight to the very new Dronestagram page, Teju Cole, New York Times Magazine photography critic, describes the progression of the drone’s-eye view.

Poet and translator of German literature Peter Filkins talks about the third novel in H.G. Adler’s trilogy about surviving the Holocaust.

Danny Heitman praises More Scenes from the Rural Life, the second essay collection published by Professor Klinkenborg from his small farm in upstate New York.

Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things, a collection of 40-plus essays spanning art, literature, and politics, will be published by Random House in 2016.

Mendelsohn finds traces of the modern fascination with robots in the works of Homer and Aristotle as he discusses the films Her and Ex Machina.

Berrigan’s innovative rectangular poems are now available online at Bomb magazine.