2008 > 01 / 02 / 03 / 04 / 05 / 06 / 07
Hallwalls
is a co-sponsor of BABEL,
a series of readings and conversations that will feature
four of the world's most important and critically acclaimed authors each year.
Follow the link to JustBuffalo's
page for information about next season's authors.
Sat., May 3 @ 8:00 p.m.
Joshua Cohen
author of
A Heaven of Others
Reading in Hallwalls CinemaFREE
Panel discussion "Is Political Fiction Possible"
@ Rust Belt Books
Sat., May 3 @ 2:00 p.m.
w/ Prof. Mark Schechner,ÊStarcherone Books Director Ted Pelton, &ÊJoshua Cohen
After a 10 year-old Jewish boy is exploded by a 10 year-old Palestinian boy, he ascends to a heaven his tradition has not prepared him for, a heaven of others. In a novel suffused with linguistic play, we find both the evocation of a world left behind and the strangeness of the non-world he has entered. At once a political novel and one that performs an overture of peace, A HEAVEN OF OTHERS is also a meditation on that most conflicted of modern and ancient cities, Jerusalem.
"Cohen's work here is brave, but perhaps more notable for its lack of judgment on today's world. Though [the protagonist] Jonathan spends much of the story reflecting on his life on Earth, especially in remembering an obviously idolized father, the afterlife that Jonathan encounters is peppered with dangers that are amorphous and beyond anything to do with the living, including religious beliefs.... Cohen draws attention away from religion and towards the diffusion of identity that follows from being integrally united with the totality of Creation. We realize through Jonathan that everything we are that makes us individual will be lost, and in chilling final lines, Cohen pinpoints that experience as being one of abject terror ... A Heaven of Others is a contemplation of life's trivialities in the face of the unknown of death, and also an affirmation of the importance of those trivialities in making us who we are as individuals—something that doesn't last for very long." - Pop Matters
JOSHUA COHEN is the author of three previous books, The Quorum, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, and Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed (illustrated, like A Heaven of Others, by Michael Hafftka). He was born in southern New Jersey in 1980. He is a book critic for The Forward and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Wed., May 14 @ 7:30 p.m.
Earth's Daughters presents
The Gray Hair Reading Series
Perry Nicholas (poet) &Penelope Prentice (poet & playwright)
$5
Penelope Prentice is Professor of English Emerita at D'Youville College. An award-winning playwright and internationally acclaimed Harold Pinter scholar, Prentice has had a dozen plays performed in New York, Washington, Buffalo, London, Australia, Ireland, Greece, Turkey, and China. Her plays, finalists in over a dozen national competitions include: Transformational Country Dances, Collector of Beautiful Men, How To Seduce Your Husband, City of No Illusions, Lady and the Cowboy for Cable Fable Channel 10, Red November Charlie December, and Thriller, winner of the Lawrence S. Epstein Award and a finalist in seven competitions including the Philadelphia Bar Association Playwriting Award and Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference. Recipient of an Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, and three New York Foundation for the Arts Sponsorships, she has held five playwright's residencies, including at Chautauqua Institution and New Perspectives Theatre Company in NYC.
A planner of the First International Women Playwrights Conference, and author of two books on England's great living dramatist, Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter, including the critically lauded Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic, she directed the documentaries?In One Voice, about the First International Women Playwrights Conference, and Bedtime Stories—Tell Me a Story I'll Never Forget, about recovery from rape/incest. Poems from her book Capturing the Light, scored by the internationally distinguished American composer Eric Ewazen, premiered as Original Light at the Julliard School, Lincoln Center. Loveplay premiered with?Ewazen's music at La MaMa in NYC in 2005. She is writer/director/producer for Against Impossible Odds, a feature documentary about the run-up to a premiere of?Ewazen's Percussion Concerto, composed for the world's leading solo percussionist, Dame Evelyn Glennie and performed at the Buffalo Philharmonic under the direction of JoAnn Falletta.
Perry S. Nicholas is an English professor at Erie Community College North. He has two chapbooks in print: Stars That Cover You and Rooms of the Atrium. He was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, in 2006 and 2007, by Skyline Magazine. In 2006, he won the Skyline Winter Poetry Bash Contest for his poem "Comealong." His poem "Santorini" appeared in the spring 2007 edition of Feile-Festa, and "Metrics" is in the winter 2008 edition of Language and Culture. His poem "March Sonnet" is online at Not Just Air.Earth's Daughters magazine, the oldest continuously published feminist literary arts periodical in the U.S., is currently celebrating its 37th year. Publication is made possible by a Decentralization grant from the Arts Council in Buffalo & Erie County, with public funds from the NYS Council on the Arts.
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