Written Arts Program Presents
A Reading by John D'Agata
Thursday, March 30, 2017
Bard Hall
6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The controversial essayist presents a free public reading
Thursday, March 30, at 6:00 p.m. in Bard Hall, game-changing essayist and editor John D'Agata reads in the Written Arts Series.Introduced by Mary Caponegro '78, Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing, and followed by a Q&A, this event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.
D'Agata is the author of Halls of Fame, The Lifespan of a Fact, About a Mountain, and the three-volume New History of the Essay series.
“John D'Agata is one of the most significant U.S. writers to emerge in the past few years. His essays combine the innovation and candor of David Shields and William Vollmann with the perception and concinnity and sheer aesthetic weight of Annie Dillard and Lewis Hyde. In nothing else recent is the compresence of shit and light that is America so vividly felt and evoked.” ―David Foster Wallace
"The Lifespan of a Fact is a Talmudically arranged account of the conflict between Jim Fingal, zealous checker, and John D’Agata, nonfiction fabulist." … "It is less a book than a knock-down, drag-out fight between two tenacious combatants, over questions of truth, belief, history, myth, memory and forgetting." —New York Times Book Review and Magazine
"In About a Mountain's circuitous, stylish investigation, D'Agata uses the federal government's highly controversial proposal to entomb the U.S.'s nuclear waste located in Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, as his way into a spiraling and subtle examination of the modern city, suicide, linguistics, Edvard Munch's The Scream, ecological and psychic degradation, and the gulf between information and knowledge. It is testament to D'Agata's skillful organization and his use of a rapid sequences of montages that readers will be pleasurably (and perhaps necessarily) disoriented but never distracted from the themes knitting together the ostensibly unrelated voices of Native American activists, politicians, geologists, Levi's parents, D'Agata's own mother, and a host of zany Las Vegans." —Publishers Weekly
For more information, call 845-758-7054, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Bard Hall