Skip to main content
  • Home
  • About
  • Faculty Experts
  • For The Media
  • Videos
  • Topics
    • Alumni
    • Events
    • Faculty
    • Library
    • Research
    • Students
    • All Topics
  • Contact
  • Submit
  • All News
  • Arts & Culture
  • Business & Economy
  • Campus & Community
  • Health & Society
  • Media, Law & Policy
  • STEM
  • Veterans
  • |
  • Alumni
  • The Peel
  • Athletics
Sections
  • All News
  • Arts & Culture
  • Business & Economy
  • Campus & Community
  • Health & Society
  • Media, Law & Policy
  • STEM
  • Veterans
  • |
  • Alumni
  • The Peel
  • Athletics
  • Home
  • About
  • Faculty Experts
  • For The Media
  • Videos
  • Topics
    • Alumni
    • Events
    • Faculty
    • Library
    • Research
    • Students
    • All Topics
  • Contact
  • Submit

Rachel Kushner Next in Raymond Carver Reading Series

Friday, March 7, 2014, By Renée K. Gadoua
Share
speakers

Rachel Kushner, a two-time finalist for the National Book Award and a finalist for Great Britain’s inaugural Folio Prize, is the next writer in the spring 2014 Raymond Carver Reading Series at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 19, in Gifford Auditorium. A question-and-answer session will precede the reading from 3:45-4:30 p.m.

The event is free and open to the public. Parking is available in SU’s paid lots.

Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner

Kushner’s most recent novel, “The Flamethrowers” (Scribner, 2013) is about Reno, a young artist, and her life in New York and Rome in the mid-1970s, and drew numerous enthusiastic reviews. The New Yorker praised the novel as “scintillatingly alive, and also alive to artifice.” It “manifests itself as a pure explosion of now,” while Kushner also “constantly entwines the invented with the real, and she often uses the power of invention to give her fiction the authenticity of the reportorial, the solidity of the historical …”

She “can really write,” The New York Times said in a review. “Her prose has a poise and wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of … Robert Stone and Joan Didion.” Booklist called the novel “astringent social critique” and said Kushner  “has forged an incandescently detailed, cosmopolitan and propulsively dramatic tale of creativity and destruction.”

“The Flamethrowers” was also named a Top Ten Book of 2013 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time magazine’s top 10 fiction books. It was also named one of eight titles on the inaugural shortlist for the Folio Prize, open to English-language fiction writers who published a book last year in Great Britain.

Kushner’s debut novel, “Telex from Cuba,” (Scribner, 2008) was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the California Book Award and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book.

“Telex from Cuba” draws on Kushner’s family history as it takes on big themes of race, class, colonialism and human relationships. The story is set amid Cuba’s 1950s sugarcane fields and the comfortable homes of the expatriates who run the United Fruit Company. “Multilayered and absorbing … Studded with illuminating images …. Kushner has fashioned a story that will linger like a whiff of decadent Colony perfume,” said a cover review in The New York Times Book Review.

In a 2013 interview with The National Book Foundation, Kushner describes the difference between writing novels and nonfiction. The novel “employs the unconscious, perhaps as fully as is possible, given our lack of access to that subterranean world of ourselves,” she said. “The novel takes instinct and knowledge and sensibility and makes of it something new, newly visible.”  Nonfiction, on the other hand, “doesn’t leave the terrain of what can be inferred from research materials.”

Kushner’s fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Artforum and Bookforum. She is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow. Kushner taught a graduate course on Proust at Syracuse University as a visiting writer in the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program in fall 2013.

SU’s reading series is named for Raymond Carver, the great short story writer and poet who taught at SU in the 1980s and died in 1988, and is presented by the Creative Writing Program in The College of Arts and Sciences.

The series will continue with the following authors. Further information is available by calling 315-443-2174.

March 27: Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including “Project X” (Knopf, 2004) and four story collections, including “You Think That’s Bad” (Knopf, 2011) and “Like You’d Understand, Anyway” (Knopf, 2007). His short stories have appeared in outlets that include Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, DoubleTake, the New Yorker and Granta. He teaches at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass.

Shepard will visit campus as the Richard Elman Visiting Writer. The Richard Elman Visiting Writer is supported by a gift from Leonard Elman in honor of his late brother Richard. In addition to the Raymond Carver event, Shepard will conduct a seminar for M.F.A. students and critique their work.

April 16: Brooks Haxton G’81 is the author of eight books of original poems and translations from the French and ancient Greek. His books include “They Lift Their Wings to Cry” (Knopf, 2008) and “Uproar: Antiphonies to Psalms” (Knopf, 2004). He is translator for “Selected Poems” by Victor Hugo (Penguin Classics, 2002). His forthcoming book, “Fading Hearts on the River” (Counterpoint, May 13, 2014), follows his son Isaac’s unlikely career as a poker player. Haxton teaches English in The College of Arts and Sciences.

April 23: Ellen Bryant Voigt is the author of several poetry collections, including “Headwaters: Poems” (Norton, 2013), “Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006” (Norton, 2007) and “Shadow of Heaven” (Norton, 2002). Voigt served as the Vermont state poet from 1999 to 2003.

  • Author

Renée K. Gadoua

  • Recent
  • Most Read
  • Related
  • YouTube Fails In Its Fight Against Disinformation
    Thursday, December 5, 2019, By Daryl Lovell
  • Community Comes Together for Peace Vigil
    Thursday, December 5, 2019, By News Staff
  • Statement from Syracuse University Regarding Closure of Crouse-Hinds Hall on Thursday, Dec. 5
    Thursday, December 5, 2019, By News Staff
  • 2020 SyracuseCoE Faculty Fellows Request for Proposals Now Open
    Thursday, December 5, 2019, By Kerrie Marshall
  • From ‘Justice for Jenny’ to Justice for All: Burton Blatt Institute Redefines ‘Supported Decision Making’
    Thursday, December 5, 2019, By News Staff
  • SU in the News: Tuesday, July 3
    Tuesday, July 3, 2012, By News Staff
  • Syracuse University Permanently Expels Theta Tau Chapter
    Saturday, April 21, 2018, By News Staff
  • Seven Syracuse Alumni Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Lists
    Thursday, January 5, 2017, By John Boccacino
  • Syracuse University Announces $118 Million Investment to Create a New Stadium Experience
    Monday, May 14, 2018, By News Staff
  • 100 Years after WWI: The Lasting Impacts of the Great War
    Monday, July 28, 2014, By Kathleen Haley
  • University College Commencement to Feature Rabbi Charles Sherman as Speaker
    Monday, May 5, 2014, By News Staff
  • Artist Stephen Talasnik to give talk Sept. 28
    Thursday, September 23, 2010, By Erica Blust
  • Fall 2011 Raymond Carver Reading Series presents award-winning poet, alumnus
    Thursday, October 6, 2011, By News Staff
  • Fetner Sustainable Enterprise Fellow Pratima Bansal to Visit SU Campus March 19-21
    Thursday, March 7, 2013, By Kelly Homan Rodoski
  • Sen. George J. Mitchell to Discuss Pan Am 103, Global Peace in Nov. 12 University Lecture
    Monday, November 4, 2013, By Kelly Homan Rodoski

More In Uncategorized

YouTube Fails In Its Fight Against Disinformation

Jennifer Grygiel, assistant professor of communications in the Newhouse School, was quoted in the Pro Publica article “YouTube Promised to Label State-Sponsored Videos But Doesn’t Always Do So.”

Syracuse Views Fall 2019

We want to know how you experience Syracuse University. It could be an amazing night view of campus, a cool class project or a beautiful day on the Einhorn Family Walk. Take a photo and share it with us. We…

Eric Gillin ’99: ‘You Make Your Own Breaks’

Update: On Oct. 24, Gillin was named chief business officer of Condé Nast’s Culture division, which includes The New Yorker, Wired, Ars Technica, Them, Pitchfork and Teen Vogue.  Last year, publisher Condé Nast announced the restructuring of its sales side, reorganizing all…

New York State Bar to Admit Syracuse’s First Black Law Graduate

Paula Johnson, Professor in the College of Law and Co-Director of the Cold Case Justice Initiative, wrote a commentary called “NYS Bar to admit Syracuse’s first black law graduate, correcting century-old injustice.” The Syracuse.com article highlights the racial injustice faced…

The City of Syracuse: Stagnant or Expanding?

Lawrence C. Davis, undergraduate chair and associate professor of architecture at the Syracuse University School of Architecture, authored an opinion piece for the Post-Standard “Cities are ‘stretching’ into their surroundings: Can Syracuse keep up?” In the article, Davis states that,…

Subscribe to SU Today

If you need help with your subscription, contact sunews@syr.edu.

Connect With Us

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Youtube
  • LinkedIn
Social Media Directory

For the Media

Find an Expert Follow @SyracuseUNews
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Youtube
  • LinkedIn
  • @SyracuseU
  • @SyracuseUNews
  • @SUCampus
  • Social Media Directory
  • Accessibility
  • Privacy
  • Campus Status
  • Syracuse.edu
© 2019 Syracuse University News. All Rights Reserved.