The last reading for the fall semester in the Raymond Carver Reading Series in the College of Arts and Sciences will be by novelist, columnist and contributing editor for Vanity Fair Elissa Schappell.
Elissa Schappell
On Wednesday, Dec. 9, Schappell will participate in an audience Q&A session at 3:45 p.m., followed by an author reading at 5:30 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public, and take place in Gifford Auditorium. For more information, contact Sarah Harwell G’05, associate director of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing, at scharwel@syr.edu.
“We are thrilled to have Schappell read in our series,” says Harwell. “She’s an extremely funny, savage writer who explores the complexities of being female while trapped in a society that expects a predetermined set of behaviors and emotions.”
Schappell is the author of two award-winning novels: “Blueprints for Building Better Girls” (Simon & Schuster, 2011) and “Use Me” (William Morrow & Co., 2000), the latter of which was a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year” and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction.
In The Rumpus, Jennifer Gilmore says “…her second book, ‘Blueprints for Building Better Girls,’ takes the wide-ranging themes that make up women’s lives and grows them into distinctive and brave connected stories, with the kinds of characters we both want to live up to, and live down.”
Schappell is a longtime columnist and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, a former senior editor of The Paris Review and co-founder and editor-at-large of Tin House magazine. Her fiction, nonfiction and criticism have appeared in various publications, including The New York Times Book Review and Spin. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University and Queens University of Charlotte (N.C.).
