ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF FICTION AND ELECTRONIC MEDIA, TO READ

NYS Writers Institute, September 27, 2012
8:00 p.m. Reading | Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
4:15 p.m. Seminar | Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus

CALENDAR LISTING:
Paul La Farge, prize-winning author of fiction and electronic media, will read from his new novel/hypertext set in the Catskill region, Luminous Airplanes (2011), on Thursday, September 27, 2012 at 8:00 p.m. in the Assembly Hall, Campus Center on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. Earlier that same day at 4:15 p.m., the author will present an informal seminar in the same location. The events are free and open to the public, and are sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute and UAlbany’s Center for Jewish Studies.

PROFILE
Paul La Farge is the author of a much-talked-about new work of fiction and electronic media, Luminous Airplanes (2011), the story of a young man who returns to his family home in the Catskills after his grandfather’s death in order to purge the house of “five generations of junk.” Published both as a conventional print novel and as an ever-expanding, electronic “immersive text,” this highly original work is generating a great deal of interest in literary circles. Readers who purchase the print version are invited online to experience new storylines, new background details, and other new dimensions of a “potentially endless” work.

Bestselling humorist Gary Shteyngart calls Luminous Airplanes, “one of the best works of fiction to come my way in a long time…. a quiet triumph of a book.” Swamplandia! author Karen Russell said, “Luminous Airplanes is a coming-of-age story like none other I’ve ever read; it is brilliant, poignant, startling, hilarious, and a really, really fun read. I loved it.” Flavorwire named it “one of the most criminally overlooked books of 2011.” In a starred review, the Kirkus reviewer called it, “An open-ended, postmodern fable that somehow delivers the satisfaction of the novelistic conventions it subverts,” and said, “Where so much experimental fiction seems pessimistic or even cynical about its possibilities, this novel sustains a spirit of innocence and wonder.”

La Farge’s most recent work was the highly inventive and peculiar “translation,” The Facts of Winter (2005), which purports to be the dreamlike, metaphysical work of fictional French poet Paul Poissel, translated into English and supplemented with notes and commentary by La Farge. The Village Voice reviewer said, “Delicate and direct, it’s barely there when closed in your palm, but opened, it performs sly thievery, nicking childlike flights between memory and imagination.”

La Farge’s earlier books include Haussmann, or the Distinction (2001), a novel about the city planner who transformed Paris into the jewel of Europe in the 19th century, and The Artist of the Missing (1999), a Kafkaesque tale of crime and murder set in a decaying city. In advance praise, bestselling author Dave Eggers said, “My favorite book of the year is Haussmann...  I haven’t heard so much music in a book in a long time, and novelist Colson Whitehead said, “Haussmann designed cities; La Farge designs worlds—splendid, elegant edifices built on the rubble of our dreams and history.”

A “writer’s writer” much better-known to his peers than to the public, La Farge is the past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. His new short story, “Another Life,” was published in the July 2, 2012 issue of the New Yorker.