Monday, October 10, 2011
Calamities in Miami
This interview ran on the website of NBC's Miami affiliate, where I'm giving a reading at Books & Books tonight, 10/10/11, at 8 PM.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Twitter Updates
Creative Nonfiction Texts
- Alexander Masters-- Stuart: A Life Backwards
- Alexander Masters-- Stuart: A Life Backwards. A tour de force of close-up biography that explores the series of catastrophes that turned a happy-go-lucky little boy into a violent, drug-addicted sociopath living on the streets of an English city.
- Frank McCourt—Angela’s Ashes. A memoir of a tragic childhood amid the poverty and squalor of 1930s Ireland.
- Joseph Mitchell – Up in the Old Hotel. Portraits of child prodigies, Mohawk iron workers, urban gypsies, and a legendary Greenwich Village eccentric that established a template for half a century of New Yorker profiles.
- Vladimir Nabokov – Speak, Memory. Nabokov’s memoir of his childhood and young manhood is above all a reflection on the operations of memory.
- Azar Nafisi. Reading Lolita in Tehran. A female professor’s experiences in 1980s Iran.
- Michael Ondaatje – Running in the Family. The author of The English Patient sifts through the facts and legends of his aristocratic Sri Lankan family.
- George Orwell. Homage to Catalonia and All Art is Propaganda. The Spanish Civil War and essays on language, literature, politics, and power.
- Nicholas Reding – Methland. The human face of the Midwest’s meth epidemic.
- Katherine Russell Rich – Dreaming in Hindi. Rich combines memoir with science writing to recount the year she spent in Rajasthan studying India’s national language.
- Richard Rodriguez. The Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father
- Oliver Sacks—The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, and Uncle Tungsten. Our foremost and most lyrical explicator of the enigmas of the brain and mind.
- W. G. Sebald – The Rings of Saturn and On the Natural History of Destruction. Two works that straddle the divide between fiction and nonfiction, history and lyric essay.
- David Sheff-- Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
- Rebecca Skloot-- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The story of African-American woman whose cells made possible the most prevalent cell llines for research.
- Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation and Regarding the Suffering of Others—Two critical works by a literary critic, novelist, and philosopher who turned serious thinking into a high-wire act.
- Gore Vidal – United States, Selected Essays. Barbed, mandarin essays on literature, politics, and American society.
- John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers. Memoir. The author's relationship with his troubled younger brother, whose career of petty crime escalates to murder and prison
- Simone Weil – Waiting for God. Essays and letters by a French Catholic mystic and social thinker.
- Terry Tempest Williams -- Refuge. A work that combines environmentalism and memoir, as Williams examines the effects of nuclear-weapons testing in Utah through the lens of her family’s history of breast cancer.
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
- Tobias Wolff – In Pharaoh’s Army, A memoir of military service in the slow-motion debacle of Vietnam
About Me
- Peter Trachtenberg
- I'm a writer based in upstate New York and the author of the memoir 7 TATTOOS and THE BOOK OF CALAMITIES: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning (Little Brown, August 2008), a book that combines reportage, memoir, and moral philosophy to explore suffering and its narratives. My essays, journalism, and short fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, BOMB, TriQuarterly, O, The New York Times Travel Magazine, and A Public Space. My commentaries have been broadcast on NPR'S "All Things Considered." In 2008-9 I was an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. I'm a recipient of a Whiting Writers Fellowship and a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The Book of Calamities was the recipient of the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award "for scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity." ptrachtenberg@gmail.com
Follow Peter Trachtenberg on Twitter
Events
- Talk, "Bill Sikes's Dog: The Value of the Irrelevant Detail in the Work of Creative Nonfiction," Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. February 18, 2010, 5:30 PM
- Talk, "The Value of the Irrelevant Detail in the Work of Creative Nonfiction." University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Wilmington, NC. November 3, 10 AM
- Panel discussion, "I Was Doing My Job: the Language of Work in Nation-building and Genocide. Olin Auditorium, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. October 22, 7:30 PM
- Reading, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA. October 15, 2009, 7 PM
- Reading and talk. Grayson Community College, Denison, TX. Sept. 17, 2009, 7 PM
Links
Followers