News and Notes by Date
December 2014
12-02-2014
Iranian American author Porochista Khakpour talks about a lifetime of writing and why she loves teaching younger students.
12-02-2014
Joseph O’Neill's The Dog, Francine Prose's Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, and James Romm's Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero all made the list.
12-01-2014
Francine Prose talks about her new novel, inspired by the real life of cross-dressing French athlete Violette Morris, who became a spy for the Gestapo during World War II.
12-01-2014
Forty-five writers contribute microfiction for this collection. Each piece is two sentences long and follows one rule: Include "thanks" in an interesting way.
12-01-2014
Husband and wife artists Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer appeared at local favorite Oblong Books on November 29 to promote Small Business Saturday.
November 2014
11-24-2014
Writer in Residence Teju Cole and Bard Fiction Prize winner Laura van den Berg talk "reader's block," genre, favorite reading spots, and more.
11-21-2014
The election of Klaus Johannis is nothing less than an "electoral earthquake" for Romania, writes Professor Manea. (PDF Download)
11-19-2014
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.
11-17-2014
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.
11-11-2014
The French government has declared books an "essential good." What does that say about French literary culture compared to that of the United States?
11-11-2014
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.
11-10-2014
11-05-2014
11-05-2014
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.
October 2014
10-31-2014
"The unnamed narrator is an American adrift in Dubai ... It’s a devastating story of a man circling the drain, lost in the last society that will have him."
10-31-2014
"The richly textured, eminently readable translations by Boyd and Olga Voronina are admirably faithful ... a generation of scholars of the emigration will be in Boyd and Voronina’s debt."
10-30-2014
Poet Robert Kelly, who was present at Dylan Thomas's last public reading before his untimely death, discusses the author and his legacy. Robert Kelly's interview begins at 18:00.
10-29-2014
On Monday, November 10, Steven Millhauser, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Martin Dressler, The Knife Thrower, and other works, reads from his most recent short-story collection, We Others: New and Selected Stories, winner of The Story Prize and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Charles Simic, in The New York Review of Books, calls We Others “a book of astonishingly beautiful and moving stories by one of America’s finest and most original writers,” and David Rollow, in the Boston Sunday Globe, writes, “Every reader knows of writers who are like secrets one wants to keep, and whose books one wants to tell the world about. Millhauser is mine.” Millhauser will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow.
10-29-2014
"Murder, dismemberment, stalking and blackmail are all part of the journey The Forgers takes through the territory where love and books overlap."
10-27-2014
Nuruddin Farah discusses his novel Hiding in Plain Sight, a story about a photographer who cares for her niece and nephew after her brother's death at the hands of extremists in Somalia.
10-23-2014
Author Laura van den Berg has been selected to receive the annual Bard Fiction Prize for 2015. 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. Van den Berg is receiving the prize for her book The Isle of Youth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013). In this collection of stories, van den Berg explores the lives of women mired in secrecy and deception. The characters in these stories are at once vulnerable and dangerous, bighearted and ruthless—grappling with the choices they have made and searching for the clues to unlock their inner worlds. Van den Berg’s residency at Bard College will be for the spring 2015 semester, during which time she will continue her writing, meet informally with students, and give a public reading.
10-23-2014
Authors Francine Prose and Ayana Mathis discuss their scariest reading experiences, both of which took place during childhood.
10-17-2014
Michael Wood praises this first-ever collection of Nabokov's letters to his wife and collaborator.
10-16-2014
On Monday, November 3, Julia Elliott, winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a Pushcart Prize, will read from her debut short-story collection, The Wilds, which Publishers Weekly describes as “a brilliant combination of emotion and grime, wit and horror… Elliott’s gift of vernacular is remarkable, and her dark, modern spin on Southern Gothic creates tales that surprise, shock, and sharply depict vice and virtue.” Elliott will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow.
10-16-2014
Daniel Mendelsohn considers why The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield doesn't have the same appeal when encountered as an adult reader.
10-15-2014
Professor of English Ben La Farge's new book moves effortlessly from the classics to contemporary drama, and fiction to television, shedding new light on the art of comedy.
10-14-2014
Bard alumna and La Voz editor Mariel Fiori '05 has been named an Entrepreneurial Woman of the Year by Gateway to Entrepreneurial Tomorrows, Inc. (GET). GET promotes economic development in the Hudson Valley by supporting women, minorities, youth, and veterans in starting their own businesses. Every year the organization recognizes outstanding regional businesspeople with the Hudson Valley Entrepreneurial Awards. Mariel Fiori, who cofounded the Spanish-language magazine La Voz as a Bard student and has edited the publication for a decade, will be recognized for her contributions as a community leader. Fiori and five other awardees will be honored at GET's 10th anniversary celebration on Thursday, October 23, as part of the Hudson Valley Entrepreneurial Conference and Expo in Wappinger Falls.
10-14-2014
Mona Simpson reviews Elena Ferrante's new novel, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and muses on the history of autobiographical fiction from Dickens to Alcott.
10-12-2014
Francine Prose writes about the appeal of Transparent, an "unlikely hit" television series about a father who comes out to his family as a trans woman in late middle age.
10-11-2014
The Classical Studies Program at Bard College presents Bracko: A reading of Sappho’s poetry on October 18 by Anne Carson, Robert Currie, Nick Flynn, and Sam Anderson. Bracko presents the lyric poetry of Sappho, the ancient Greek poet known to many English-speaking readers through Anne Carson’s translation If Not, Winter. In addition to welcoming Sappho’s most distinguished translator to Bard, the event celebrates an extraordinary moment in the history of Sappho’s poetry. Sappho made headlines in the international press this year because of the rare discovery of two previously unknown poems.
10-02-2014
Nabokov's passionate letters to his wife and collaborator Véra Slonim have been published for the first time, and were co–edited and translated by Olga Voronina, Russian and Eurasian Studies Program director.
10-02-2014
Senior Fellow Wyatt Mason discusses life, culture, religion, and humanity with author Marilynne Robinson.
September 2014
09-24-2014
In the second in a regular series of conversations hosted by Bard professor Neil Gaiman, author and artist Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler’s Wife) discusses time travel, Doctor Who, graveyards, taxidermy, graphic novels, pictures, books, and long-distance romance. The program takes place on Friday, October 3 at 7:30 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater.
09-19-2014
Bard MFA photography faculty Mark Alice Durant interviews MFA writing faculty David Levi Strauss on art, writing, and politics.
09-10-2014
Karen Russell, the 2011 Bard Fiction Prize winner, talks with Bard literature professor and Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow about his new book, The Forgers.
09-06-2014
On Monday, September 15, Joseph O'Neill, Bard’s Distinguished Visiting Professor of Written Arts and the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning Netherland, will read from his new novel, The Dog. Publishers Weekly describes The Dog as “Pitch-perfect prose . . . Clever, witty, and profoundly insightful, this is a beautifully crafted narrative about a man undone by a soulless society.”
09-05-2014
Bard alumnus Lindsay Hill's first novel, Sea of Hooks, has won the PEN Center's top prize for fiction. Hill will give a reading of his work at Bard on September 22.
09-05-2014
On Monday, September 22, author Lindsay Hill ’75, will read from his novel, Sea of Hooks, winner of the 2014 PEN Center USA Fiction Award, finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, and named one of the top 10 books of the year by Publisher’s Weekly and New York magazine. Kirkus Reviews calls Sea of Hooks “a remarkable and multifaceted novel—philosophical, poignant and puzzling,” while Publisher’s Weekly writes that “nearly every paragraph astonishes, every moment rich with magic and daring.”
09-04-2014
Writer in Residence Mona Simpson is a former senior editor at the Paris Review and the author of five novels.
She was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, then moved to Los Angeles as a young teenager. Her father was a recent immigrant from Syria and her mother was the daughter of a mink farmer and the first person in her family to attend college. Simpson went to Berkeley, where she studied poetry. She worked as a journalist before moving to New York to attend Columbia's M.F.A. program. During graduate school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, and Mademoiselle. She stayed in New York and worked as an editor at the Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel, Anywhere But Here (1986). After that, she wrote The Lost Father (1992), A Regular Guy (1997), and Off Keck Road (2000). Simpson has been awarded a Whiting Prize (1986), a Guggenheim (1988), a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University (1987), a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Prize (1995), and a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize (2001). She is a Pen Faulkner finalist (2001) and most recently received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008). She worked 10 years on My Hollywood (2010). "It’s the book that took me too long because it meant so much to me," she says. Mona lives in Santa Monica with her two children and Bartleby the dog.August 2014
08-29-2014
"My job is to imagine. I am a novelist," says Joseph O'Neill, distinguished visiting professor of written arts, in this interview about his new book, set in Dubai.
08-29-2014
How do some literary works retain broad appeal for centuries after they are written, while others—recognized by scholars and critics as brilliant—largely fade away?
08-26-2014
Teju Cole visits Leukerbad, Switzerland, the site of James Baldwin's essay, and examines racism by retracing Baldwin's footsteps and his writing.
08-17-2014
Language and Thinking faculty member Miranda Mellis considers what she learned from the various jobs she held beginning in her childhood, and how that contributed to her writing.
08-15-2014
Joseph O'Neill's The Dog and Bradford Morrow's The Forgers are listed among Publisher's Weekly's most anticipated books of the season.
08-01-2014
"There is no poetry without a politics," says Bard alumnus Andrew Durbin '12 in this interview about poetry, surveillance, and the Internet.
08-01-2014
Bard faculty member and Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow's new novel The Forgers has been listed among Publisher's Weekly's most anticipated books of the fall.
July 2014
07-31-2014
Bard writer in residence Francine Prose reviews Andrea Canobbio’s "remarkable" novel of an intense and ill-fated love affair between two doctors.
07-30-2014
07-24-2014
"The life of the first emperor is an ideal vehicle for a historical novel," writes Professor Mendelsohn. "Augustus is a figure about whom we know at once a great deal and very little ..."
07-24-2014
The Bard Center for Civic Engagement announces more than 50 winners for the 2014 Community Action Award program, which supports student efforts to engage with communities locally, nationally, and internationally by providing funding for participation in internships that address issues impacting people around the world.