Wednesday, April 18: Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics’ Circle Award for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but this week in particular, the world of belles-lettres is abuzz with admiration for Díaz’s moving account in The New Yorker about the fact that he was raped at the age of eight, and the way that the need to conceal that fact has twisted his life and relationships ever after.
Thursday, April 12: A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is also the author of more than 20 books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator.
“Writing is easy,” sportswriter Gene Fowler famously said. “All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”
Saturday, March 24: Struck by the presence of High Point Mountain looming outside her home, the natural world of the Catskill Mountains and her relationship with it became Straub’s bedrock. “I would not be who I am without this body of water and this mountain range.”
Area residents typically think of the John Burroughs Association as a local not-for-profit organization that maintains Slabsides and the surrounding nature sanctuary and trails in West Park. But the Association also has a national profile as a respected conferrer of annual literary awards in the genre of nature writing, helping to keep alive the primary profession of the great 19th-century naturalist himself.
Reading at Oblong Books on Tuesday, March 27: The novel, like much of this SUNY-New Paltz professor’s work, has a Gothic flavor, including a Victorian-era insane asylum inspired in part by the Hudson River State Hospital in Poughkeepsie.
Saturday, March 24: “An Evening with Colm Tóibín” should be a treat. His novels are quiet and intense, but in person, Tóibín is warm and gregarious, cracking jokes and telling stories, able to speak at length and with insight about both the sublime possibilities of fiction and the nitty-gritty of the writing process.
Saturday, March 24: This year’s Woodstock Bookfest will feature the world premiere of Lost Dreams, a collaboration between the late writer John Hersey and his son Baird, a composer who lives in West Shokan.
The story begins on a Ridge in rural Ulster County, the smell of pine in the air and vultures circling above as a boy fires a BB gun at a girl tied to a tree while another boy watches.
The book is positioned as a celebration of nature’s fragile ecosystems and of the David v. Goliath community members (for David’s tactics, in this case, were largely litigatory) banded together to protect them. But in the moment-to-moment of the prose and in the very consciously balanced, 360-degree management of his facts, Mabee reveals himself mostly as a fastidious historian and no polemicist at all.