With all the buzz that surrounded the Dragon Girl series, I became intrigued with the numerous references to the "best" Swedish mystery writer who had been overlooked. During a recent flight to LA, (my favorite reading time), I finally dipped in to Hennig Mankell and I am hooked.
Ever the conventionalist, I started with the first of the series of his signature character, Kurt Wallander, called Faceless Killers. All I can say is get your hands on anything this guy has written, it was fabulous! A quick but riveting read, great characters, great plot, great backstory, it was a ton of fun and kept me awake from Richmond all the way to LA, no small feat. OK, I might have had a short nap, but still...
The best part of this book, in my opinion, is that Mankell was able to paint a horrific picture of crime without actually recounting all the details. I for one, do not want to have terrifying criminal acts of violence explicitly described, it is just too upsetting. For that reason, I really enjoyed the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo, and refused to watch the American one; just too much information.
In this novel, the intention and outcome was apparent without having to slog through the exact actions. Thank you, Hennig Mankell! So for those of you who love a great mystery, here is your guy.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Performing Texts at University of Richmond
Hi! If anyone is interested in going to any of these, let me know. It'd be fun to go and have a glass of wine/snacks at my house (just a minute off campus) afterwards. After reading The Round House, it seems that Sherman Alexie's reading on March 5 might be interesting.
xo,
Fiona
"Performing Texts is a special series sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that focuses not only on the way in which authors perform their texts, but also on the way in which texts themselves perform.
The readings and talks listed below are free and open to the general public. Most writers will make themselves available, following their appearance, to answer questions from the audience and sign copies of their books.
Amiri Baraka and Anne Waldman
Feb. 5, 7 p.m.
Keller Hall
Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, N.J. He published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. His Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) is still regarded as the seminal work on Afro-American music and culture. His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman at Cherry Lane Theatre in New York in 1964; it subsequently won an Obie Award for Best Off-Broadway Play and was made into a film. Baraka’s numerous literary honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation for Drama, and Poet Laureate of New Jersey. His book Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music was released in 2009 and was selected by the Before Columbus Foundation as the winner of the American Book Award for 2010.
Internationally recognized and acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades, as a writer, editor, master teacher, performer, scholar, curator, and activist. She is the author of more than 40 books including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman, a collection of essays entitled Vow to Poetry, and the monumental anti-war feminist epic, The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, a 25-year project in three volumes. Waldman is the recipient of the prestigious Shelley Memorial Award, and The Iovis Trilogy has been awarded the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, and cofounded with Allen Ginsberg the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired university in the western hemisphere.
Anne Waldman
The Voice's Daughter: Poet as Performer
Feb. 6, 4:30 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall
Junot Diaz
February 19, 7 p.m.
Jepson Alumni Center
Junot Díaz was born and raised in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Time Out, Glimmer Train, Story, and African Voices. Díaz’s story collection Drown was published in 1996 and is in its 23rd printing and was sold in 15 countries. His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won the Pulitzer Prize and remained on The New York Times and independent bookstore bestseller lists for two years. Díaz’s next story collection, This Is How You Lose Her, was published in September 2012 and was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. A recent MacArthur Fellow, he is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Holly Hughes
Feb. 26, 7 p.m.
Modlin Center, Cousins Studio Theater
Holly Hughes is a performance artist and writer. She is the author of more than a dozen plays and performance pieces, five of which were collected in Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler published by Grove Press. She is also the co-editor of three other books, O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance (with David Roman), Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (with Una Chadhuri), and Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café (with Alina Troyano). She is the winner of numerous awards including a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lambda Book Award, a GLAAD Media Award, as well as funding from the NEA, NYSCA, and other sources. Currently she is professor of art and design, women’s studies, and theatre and drama at the University of Michigan, and director of the BFA Program in Interarts Performance.
Sherman Alexie
March 5, 7 p.m.
Jepson Alumni Center
Author, poet, and screenwriter Sherman Alexie was named one of The New Yorker’s top 20 writers for the 21st century. After growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington, Alexie tells tales of contemporary American Indian life laced with razor-sharp humor, unsettling candor, and biting wit. Alexie’s first novel, Reservation Blues, won Booklist’s Editor’s Choice Award for Fiction. His second book, Indian Killer, was a New York Times Notable Book. His 2009 book of short stories, War Dances, won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Alexie wrote and produced the film Smoke Signals based on his book, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. He released Blasphemy, an anthology of new stories and beloved classics, in October 2012.
Philip Auslander
March 19, 4 p.m.
Keller Hall
Philip Auslander’s primary research interest is in performance, especially in relation to music, media, and technology. He has written on aesthetic and cultural performances as diverse as theatre, performance art, music, stand-up comedy, robotic performance, and courtroom procedures. He is the author of five books and editor or co-editor of two collections. His most recent books are Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (2006) and the second edition of Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (2008). In addition to his work on performance, Auslander contributes art criticism regularly to ArtForum and other publications. He has written catalogue essays for museums and galleries in Austria, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He is the founding editor of The Art Section: An Online Journal of Art and Cultural Commentary, published online ten times a year at theartsection.com.
Sharon Olds
April 9, 7 p.m.
Keller Hall
Sharon Olds is the author of eight volumes of poetry. With sensuality, humor, and remarkable imagery, she expresses truths about domestic and political violence, sexuality, family relationships, love, and the body. Her numerous honors include an NEA grant, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and being named New York State Poet Laureate from 1998–2000. She won the San Francisco Poetry Center award for her collection Satan Says, and received the Lamont Poetry Selection and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Dead and the Living. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times. Olds teaches graduate poetry workshops at New York University and helped found a writing workshop at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely disabled. Her most recent collection, Stag’s Leap, was published in September 2012 and recently won Britain's TS Eliot Poetry Prize."
xo,
Fiona
"Performing Texts is a special series sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that focuses not only on the way in which authors perform their texts, but also on the way in which texts themselves perform.
The readings and talks listed below are free and open to the general public. Most writers will make themselves available, following their appearance, to answer questions from the audience and sign copies of their books.
Amiri Baraka and Anne Waldman
Feb. 5, 7 p.m.
Keller Hall
Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, N.J. He published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. His Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) is still regarded as the seminal work on Afro-American music and culture. His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman at Cherry Lane Theatre in New York in 1964; it subsequently won an Obie Award for Best Off-Broadway Play and was made into a film. Baraka’s numerous literary honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation for Drama, and Poet Laureate of New Jersey. His book Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music was released in 2009 and was selected by the Before Columbus Foundation as the winner of the American Book Award for 2010.
Internationally recognized and acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades, as a writer, editor, master teacher, performer, scholar, curator, and activist. She is the author of more than 40 books including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman, a collection of essays entitled Vow to Poetry, and the monumental anti-war feminist epic, The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, a 25-year project in three volumes. Waldman is the recipient of the prestigious Shelley Memorial Award, and The Iovis Trilogy has been awarded the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, and cofounded with Allen Ginsberg the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired university in the western hemisphere.
Anne Waldman
The Voice's Daughter: Poet as Performer
Feb. 6, 4:30 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall
Junot Diaz
February 19, 7 p.m.
Jepson Alumni Center
Junot Díaz was born and raised in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Time Out, Glimmer Train, Story, and African Voices. Díaz’s story collection Drown was published in 1996 and is in its 23rd printing and was sold in 15 countries. His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won the Pulitzer Prize and remained on The New York Times and independent bookstore bestseller lists for two years. Díaz’s next story collection, This Is How You Lose Her, was published in September 2012 and was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. A recent MacArthur Fellow, he is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Holly Hughes
Feb. 26, 7 p.m.
Modlin Center, Cousins Studio Theater
Holly Hughes is a performance artist and writer. She is the author of more than a dozen plays and performance pieces, five of which were collected in Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler published by Grove Press. She is also the co-editor of three other books, O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance (with David Roman), Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (with Una Chadhuri), and Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café (with Alina Troyano). She is the winner of numerous awards including a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lambda Book Award, a GLAAD Media Award, as well as funding from the NEA, NYSCA, and other sources. Currently she is professor of art and design, women’s studies, and theatre and drama at the University of Michigan, and director of the BFA Program in Interarts Performance.
Sherman Alexie
March 5, 7 p.m.
Jepson Alumni Center
Author, poet, and screenwriter Sherman Alexie was named one of The New Yorker’s top 20 writers for the 21st century. After growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington, Alexie tells tales of contemporary American Indian life laced with razor-sharp humor, unsettling candor, and biting wit. Alexie’s first novel, Reservation Blues, won Booklist’s Editor’s Choice Award for Fiction. His second book, Indian Killer, was a New York Times Notable Book. His 2009 book of short stories, War Dances, won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Alexie wrote and produced the film Smoke Signals based on his book, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. He released Blasphemy, an anthology of new stories and beloved classics, in October 2012.
Philip Auslander
March 19, 4 p.m.
Keller Hall
Philip Auslander’s primary research interest is in performance, especially in relation to music, media, and technology. He has written on aesthetic and cultural performances as diverse as theatre, performance art, music, stand-up comedy, robotic performance, and courtroom procedures. He is the author of five books and editor or co-editor of two collections. His most recent books are Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (2006) and the second edition of Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (2008). In addition to his work on performance, Auslander contributes art criticism regularly to ArtForum and other publications. He has written catalogue essays for museums and galleries in Austria, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He is the founding editor of The Art Section: An Online Journal of Art and Cultural Commentary, published online ten times a year at theartsection.com.
Sharon Olds
April 9, 7 p.m.
Keller Hall
Sharon Olds is the author of eight volumes of poetry. With sensuality, humor, and remarkable imagery, she expresses truths about domestic and political violence, sexuality, family relationships, love, and the body. Her numerous honors include an NEA grant, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and being named New York State Poet Laureate from 1998–2000. She won the San Francisco Poetry Center award for her collection Satan Says, and received the Lamont Poetry Selection and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Dead and the Living. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times. Olds teaches graduate poetry workshops at New York University and helped found a writing workshop at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely disabled. Her most recent collection, Stag’s Leap, was published in September 2012 and recently won Britain's TS Eliot Poetry Prize."
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
The Round House and other interesting things
Hello, once again we had a fun, fun night and the discussion on the book went on and on and on. It is always interesting when so many people engage in the story and have a lot to say about it! And even better, the majority of us really liked the book and admired the way Louise Erdrich crafted the story. While this was not her finest writing, it was plenty good enough!
Before we get there, terrific thanks to Maggie who not only hosted, but also made the most delicious chicken mole. This is truly food for the gods the way Maggie makes it and it bears no resemblance to the brown stuff out of a can that most Mexican restaurants offer up. Of course it also takes hours upon hours to prepare, so thank you so much! Much to our concern, Maggie tripped and had a bit of a hard fall resulting in a cracked collarbone and a trip to Patient First. The good news is that she is doing well and resting at home. Leave it to Maggie to make sure we all had dinner and our discussion before heading out to get checked out!
There was so much talk about the book that it is hard to do it all justice. Many commented on the precocious attitude of Joe, who was supposed to be 13 years old. On the other hand, he did seem so typical of a teenage boy. Of course the situation was heartbreaking and the tangle of legal jurisdictions infuriating. What was so wonderful, and many commented on it, was how the story was so much more than this complicated story of his mother's rape and search for the person responsible.
It was the human side of the story that was so compelling for most of us. That the author took this plot line and made it so personal; it was really impressive and also gripping. The difficult process of deciding on a course of action, the dread and determination to carry it out and the way his friend Cappy appeared at just the right time to help was a wonderful, if wrenching part of the book.
Someone brought up the good twin/bad twin relationship between Linda and Lark; that she was deformed yet a kind and helpful person but he was handsome and evil, another interesting layer of detail in the book. Like so many of Erdrich's books, the characters have a bit of their future lives unfold in this story, and usually also ancestors who appeared in other books when their own stories were told, like Nanapush. Erdrich herself said that she feels that she really is writing only one novel, one that covers years and generations of the same families, the same tribes and how they all connect together in some way.
Val had such an interesting perspective as she grew up in a tiny Minnesota town that was right by (or on?) a reservation. While she enjoyed the book, she also felt as it the general reservation experience is no where near as positive and intact as the characters in this book. Her experience was of disengaged or missing parents and isolated and directionless children, with low standards and lower expectations. Hopefully, life has improved on the reservations, but it is a reminder that perhaps these characters were the lucky ones in their environments, another element of interest.
For those who enjoyed this, Erdrich's first novel was Love Medicine which still rates as one of my most beloved books and it is a great place to start on this long and lovely saga of the Northern Plains Indians. I am lucky enough to have a first edition from a print run of 5,000 so I have been a fan for a long time! My current favorite of the more recent books is The Painted Drum but it is hard to go wrong with any of her books.
Thanks to all who came and special thanks to our hostess Maggie! Our next meeting is at Mary Millhiser's house on Feb. 11 at 6:30. The books are either Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollen or Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. They are both about the food chain If you want to get even more riled up about it, watch the movie King Corn as well.
The date for March is also the 11th, bring ideas for the March book as we didn't come to a consensus yet. Anyone interested in a fabulous Soviet murder mystery? Child 44 just might be my suggestion, it is awesome.
Thanks everyone for coming, see you in February!
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