Joyce Carol Oates and Adam Braver will be reading from their work at 7 p.m. tonight (Tuesday, July 19, 2022), a free online Zoom event of the NYS Summer Writers Institute.
Reservations are not required. Attend the readings on Zoom with this link.
While we don't know what they'll be reading, there's plenty to choose from: Oates has written 58 novels and Braver has written six, with his seventh novel coming out in November. Interestingly, both writers have published novels about Marilyn Monroe. A film based on Oates' novel Blonde will be released on Netflix in September.
From the publishers:
In Blonde, one of her most ambitious works, Joyce Carol Oates boldly reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jeane Baker—the child, the woman, the fated celebrity, and idolized blonde the world came to know as Marilyn Monroe.
In a voice startlingly intimate and rich, Norma Jeane tells her own story of an emblematic American artist—intensely conflicted and driven—who had lost her way
Adam Braver’s Misfit centers on the last weekend of Monroe’s life, which she spent at Frank Sinatra’s resort, the Cal Neva Lodge, in Lake Tahoe. Melding facts with fiction, Braver takes moments throughout Monroe’s life―her childhood, her marriages with Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, her studies with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, and her role in The Misfits, the film Miller wrote for her―and explores how they informed her tragic end.
7 p.m. Tuesday, July 19: Joyce Carol Oates and Adam Braver
Joyce Carol Oates, a frequent guest at both the NYS Writers Institute and the NYS Summer Writers Institute, won the National Book Award for her novel them and has since written dozens of novels and short story collections that have made her one of the most celebrated writers of her generation. Among her 58 novels are Blonde; We Were The Mulvaneys; Zombie; and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. Her 2008 novel Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway featured fictionalized accounts of the final days of various iconic American writers.
The Falls won the 2005 Prix Femina as the best novel in France. John Updike wrote of her in The New Yorker: “If the phrase ‘woman of letters’ existed, Joyce Carol Oates would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it.” Apart from her many works of fiction, Oates has also written acclaimed books of poetry and a number of books of non-fiction and memoir, the best known of which are On Boxing and A Widow’s Tale.
Adam Braver has been a visiting author at the NYS Summer Writers Institute more than a dozen times. His historical novels include Mr. Lincoln’s Wars; Divine Sarah, a look at early 20th-century actress Sarah Bernhardt; Crows Over the Wheatfield; November 22, 1963; his Marilyn Monroe novel Misfit; and The Disappeared.
His books have been selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers program, Border’s Original Voices series, the IndieNext list, and twice for the Book Sense list; as well as having been translated into Italian, Japanese, Turkish, and French.
His new novel, Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney, will be published in November. (“Brilliant and inventive work,” wrote a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. “A novelist whose works are richly imagined,” says the Washington Post.)
MORE: In a recent edition of Salmagundi, published by NYS Summer Writers Institute Director Robert Boyers, Braver joined poet/songwriter Marc Woodworth and novelist Rick Moody for a discussion of the Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary.
Also this week
July 20: Student Reading (Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction)
July 21: Jamaica Kincaid (Fiction) & Henri Cole (Poetry)
About the NYS Summer Writers Institute
The NYS Summer Writers Institute was founded and is still produced by author and professor Robert Boyers at Skidmore College, with sponsorship from Northshire Bookstores and in collaboration with the NYS Writers Institute at the University at Albany.
Previous visiting writers include Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje, Pulitzer Prize winner and NYS Writers Institute Founder William Kennedy, Mary Gordon, Tom Healy, Margo Jefferson, Binnie Kirshenbaum, John McWhorter, James Miller, Caryl Phillips, Katha Pollitt, Francine Prose and Victoria Redel.
Schedule subject to change. For more information, call the NYS Summer Writers Institute at 518-580-5593.
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