News from the Division of Languages and Literature

This summer, Martha Orlet '15 and Cassandra Settman '13 are both interning with Independent Thought and Social Action in India (ITSA), an organization started by a BHSEC-Manhattan alumna. ITSA participants run writing workshops for teens. Orlet says "I believe I will gain very unique and precious insight into teaching . . . while gaining knowledge of Indian culture and experience . . . new ways of living, socializing, and learning."

Mesmerists and hoarders. Conspiracy theorists and martyrs. Fetishists and addicts. Saints and sinners. Riveted explores the idea of obsession, the world of fixation, the idée fixe.

“I always find it momentarily surprising that literary nonfiction is treated as something new and strange. I guess I tend to imagine fiction and nonfiction as fraternal twins, born almost at the same instant, apparently distinct but each unimaginable without the other. They perform complementary functions, and fact and invention each require the existence of the other, perhaps off to the side and perhaps not, to achieve their particular credibility.”

An excerpt from faculty member and author Norman Manea's novel The Black Envelope is now available on the Yale Books blog.

Daniel Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College. An award-winning writer and critic and author of the international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, he was born on Long Island and educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton.

Since 1991, when he began publishing, his essays and reviews have appeared in many publications, most frequently in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He has also been the weekly book critic for New York and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and is presently a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. The Lost, published by HarperCollins in 2006, won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award in the United States and the Prix Médicis in France, among many other honors, and has been published in more than 15 languages. Other books include a memoir, The Elusive Embrace (1999), a New York Times Notable Book of the year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; a collection of his reviews, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (2008), a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and an acclaimed two-volume translation of the poetry of C. P. Cavafy (2009), also a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Mendelsohn’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Book Reviewing, and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism, and two Mellon Foundation awards. In 2012 he was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2008 Daniel Mendelsohn was named by the Economist as one of the best critics writing in the English language.

Before his father Jay's death, Bard classics professor Daniel Mendelsohn retraced with him the path of Odysseus' Mediterranean journey.

The Hannah Arendt Center and the Written Arts Program at Bard College present a one-day conference exploring the state of the individual in the landscape of Cuba and its diaspora on Wednesday, April 18, from 12 to 8 p.m. All events take place in the Bertelsmann Campus Center and are open to the public; no reservations are necessary.

Bard writer in residence Teju Cole discusses his Tweets on NPR's Morning Edition.

"One of the great surprises upon arriving at Bard College was meeting Norman Manea. Manea, who was born in Romania, spent four years as a child in a concentration camp, many more as a dissident, and finally relocated to NYC and Bard College," writes Roger Berkowitz.

Prose writes, "Wharton’s graceful sentences create dramatic, populous tableaux and peel back layer after layer of artifice and pretense ... revealing the hidden kernel of what human beings are like, alone and together."

Our faculty has a way with words: Bard writers in residence Teju Cole and Benjamin Hale (2012 Bard Fiction Prize winner), as well as Karen Russell (2011 Bard Fiction Prize winner) have been selected as finalists for the 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award.

Bard Fiction Prize recipient and visiting faculty Benjamin Hale will read from his award-winning novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Monday Feb. 27. The novel won both the Bard Fiction Prize and the Michener-Copernicus Award, and was called “a brave and visionary work of genius” by the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Love, the 80s, disco, Nakuru, Boney M ..." all in short story by Bard faculty member and author Binyavanga Wainaina.

In the Annandale area next week? Come hear Tom McCarthy read from his highly praised debut novel, Remainder, “one of the great English novels of the last 10 years,” according to Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books.

Congratulations to John Ashbery, who today was presented with a National Humanities Medal from President Obama! Ashbery is Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Languages and Literature at Bard. He is a world-renowned poet and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award.

Bard writing and photography professor Luc Sante on the personal and professional Burroughs revealed in new collection of letters, Rub Out the Words.

The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) is pleased to present Joe / Brains / Lamar, a multi-format program addressing questions of archive, memory, and the genealogy of queer culture. Opening on February 1, 2012 and unfolding over the course of two months, Joe / Brains / Lamar features the participation of Matt Wolf, Carl Williamson, Ron Padgett, Anselm Berrigan, Ann Lauterbach, and Karly Wildenhaus, and includes a video installation, publication, website, archival display, and poetry reading co-hosted by CCS Bard and the John Ashbery Poetry Series.

Writer in Residence Edie Meidav interviews literature professor and Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow

Literature professor Bradford Morrow's book of "morally complex tales," The Uninnocent, makes New York Times Editors' Choice list!

Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose has been on the Bard faculty since 2005. The recipient of many awards, Prose has published more than 20 books, including the novel Blue Angel (2000), a National Book Award nominee.

Other fiction includes the novels A Changed Man (2005), Hunters and Gatherers (1995), Primitive People (1992), and Bigfoot Dreams (1986), as well as the story collection Guided Tours of Hell (1997). Along with Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife (2009) and Caravaggio (2005), Prose’s nonfiction includes the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer (2006), Sicilian Odyssey (2003), and Gluttony: The Seven Deadly Sins (2003). Her stories and essays have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories, the New Yorker, and the New York Times among many others. She is a contributing editor at Harper’s, a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and a former president of PEN American Center. She is a recipient of the Edith Wharton Achievement Award for Literature; the Washington University International Humanities Medal; Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships; and many other grants and awards. She received her B.A. from Radcliffe College.

Acclaimed Romanian émigré writer Norman Manea is the Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture and writer in residence at Bard College. He has been a member of the Bard faculty since 1989 and is the author of 22 volumes of fiction and essays.

Among numerous honors, he has received the United States MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, The National Jewish Book Award and the Literary Lion Medal by the State Library of New York, has been awarded Italy’s International Nonino Prize for Literature, and been elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Art. His memoir The Hooligan’s Return received France’s Prix Médicis Étranger in 2006. In 2007, he was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit by the President of Romania and in 2008 received honorary degrees in literature from the University of Bucharest and Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania. In 2009, the French Ministry of Culture conferred the most prestigious title of Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres on him. His work has been translated into 20 languages. He lives with his wife in New York City.

Mary Caponegro is the Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing at Bard, and has been on the faculty since 2002. She was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Italy, graduating in 1978 from Bard College and going on to receive her master’s degree from Brown University.

Author Jonathan Safran Foer has called her “one of the most imaginative, daring, serious and playful writers alive.” She is the author of five short story collections: Tales from the Next Village, The Star Café, Five Doubts, The Complexities of Intimacy, and All Fall Down. She is a contributor to Review of Contemporary Fiction, Epoch, Conjunctions, Sulfur, Gargoyle, and Iowa Review, and a contributing editor for Conjunctions and Tyuonyi. Caponegro has received the General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers, the Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature from American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Bruno Arcudi Award, Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College, Teacher of the Year Award from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the Undergraduate Teaching Award from Syracuse University, and the Lannan Residency Fellowship.

In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe supports fuel-subsidy protests and says that Nigeria's unrest can be eased by better, less-corrupt leaders.

Bard literature professor and Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow on his new book, imagination, entropy, and the dark side of human nature.

Bradford Morrow has been on the Bard College faculty since 1990. He is a professor of literature, as well as a Bard Center fellow and the founding editor of Conjunctions, the distinguished literary magazine published by Bard.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Professor Morrow grew up in Denver, Colorado, and has lived or worked in a variety of places, including rural Honduras, Paris, and Cuneo, Italy. He received his B.A. from the University of Colorado and did his graduate studies as a Danforth Fellow at Yale University. Morrow is the author of six novels, including Trinity Fields, Giovanni's Gift, Ariel's Crossing, and The Diviner's Tale, as well as an illustrated children's book, Didn't Didn't Do It, with Gahan Wilson, and several poetry collections. He has edited numerous books, including, with Sam Hamill, The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. He is coeditor of The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, and author of the short story collection The Uninnocent and the novella The Fall of the Birds. He is completing work on his seventh novel, The Prague Sonata, as well as a book of creative nonfiction works, Meditations on a Shadow. Professor Morrow is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction (2007), PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in literary journal editing (2007); O. Henry Prize (2003); and the Academy Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998). He was a member of the board of trustees of the PEN American Center from 1998 to 2002.

Ann Lauterbach has been, since 1990, cochair of writing in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and, since 1997, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

Lauterbach has published eight collections of poetry: Many Times, But Then (1979), Before Recollection (1987), Clamor (1991), And for Example (1994), On a Stair (1997), If in Time: Selected Poems 1975-2000 (2001), Hum (2005), and Or to Begin Again (2009). She has also published several chapbooks and collaborations with visual artists, including How Things Bear Their Telling with Lucio Pozzi and A Clown, Some Colors, a Doll, Her Stories, a Song, a Moonlit Cove with Ellen Phelan for the Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum, New York. She has written on art and poetics in relation to cultural value, notably in a book of essays, The Night Sky: Writings on the poetics of experience (Penguin 2005, 2008). She collaborated with artist Ann Hamilton for the “Whitecloth” catalogue at the Aldrich Museum, and wrote the introductory essay to Joe Brainard’s “Nancy” drawings for The Nancy Book, published by Siglio Press (2008). Lauterbach’s essay “The Thing Seen: Reimagining Arts Education for Now” is included in Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century), edited by Steven Madoff (MIT Press 2009). She is a Visiting Core Critic (Sculpture) at Yale. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The New York State Foundation for the Arts, Ingram Merrill, and The John D. and Catherine C. MacArthur Foundation.

Bard High School Early College takes on The Iliad in an all-day marathon reading.

It's been a busy fall for La Farge, whose new novel, Luminous Airplanes, debuted in October, garnering raves from the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and others. Usually a novelist’s work is done long before publication. But La Farge, whose previous books include The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999); Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001); and The Facts of Winter (McSweeney’s, 2005), has launched Luminous Airplanes in two different formats: a traditional print novel and a spectacularly ambitious online "immersive text," to which he is still adding content.

What would you tell the world's seven-billionth person so that he or she could be a responsible citizen? The Center for Civic Engagement sponsors an essay contest for students in Bard's network of institutions.

Bard literature professor and Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow's novella Fall of the Birds e-book just released today! Watch book trailer via Open Road Media.

The Annual Bard Fiction Prize has been awarded to Benjamin Hale for his debut novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore. Hale will receive a $30,000 award and join Bard as writer in residence for the spring 2012 semester.

On Monday, October 31, at Bard College, Bard College writer in residence Edie Meidav will read from her highly praised recent novel, Lola, California. Meidav is the winner of the 2006 Bard Fiction Prize and author of Crawl Space and The Far Field. In praise of Lola, California, the New Yorker wrote, “Meidav captures the self-indulgence of adolescent friendship and the tension underlying familial bonds, languidly teasing out the surprising secrets of the past.”