“Narrative as Provocation” by Rita Banerjee – Los Angeles Review of Books

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In this week’s edition of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rita Banerjee reviews Douglas Piccinnini’s Story Book: A Novella.  She writes:

DOUGLAS PICCINNINI’S Story Book: A Novella suspends and electrifies narration mid-creation. Story Book explores narratives of self-imposed amnesia, bloody encounters at home and on the road, Oedipal rage, suburban cocoons and the anxiety of marriage, male sexuality and therapy sessions gone awry, Catholic school and homosociality, confrontations with love, death, and surveillance, and of course, the purported cure-all of worst-case scenario guides. The “novella” is composed of a series of short stories which all begin with the title, “Chapter 1.” Each Chapter 1, laced with metatextuality, develops its own existential confusions before arriving at a moment of implosion or interruption.

Story Book is thus about a modern man, a modern artist, and a modern thinker disabled by language. The ghosts of Gertrude Stein, A. R. Ammons, and Samuel Beckett haunt Piccinnini’s prose as each chapter performs its role as self-confrontation or self-interview. Piccinnini’s power as a writer emerges when his disabled speaker learns how to articulate himself, and how to use the very language that hinders his understanding of himself, in order to climb out of existential dilemmas and tailspins…

Another “CStory-Bookhapter 1” begins with the simple provocation: “What did I love?” In this chapter, the speaker sits alone at his computer trying to decipher the meaning of his relationships with women and his odd infatuation with words. He ponders the difficulty of writing an address, a story in which the perspectives of the “you” and “I” combine and trade places. He considers how easily days of productivity disappear as the writer attempts to get a sense of urgency on paper. He writes, “I feel the quotation of an afternoon, emptied — empty before me,” and then reveals:

This is the third time I’ve lived with a woman.

I’ve been in love before. I’ve been loved. I’ve also wanted to have sex with the same person over and over again but that is not love, I think.

Sex can be love. But love and sex are different, obviously. Is it obvious? Sometimes you’ll want to have sex with someone you don’t know and never want to know. You’ll find yourself destroying a complete stranger in some compromising position. It would seem to be some biological failure, love and how we live.

This is the first time I’ve been married. I love my wife. I read recently, “Love is a condition of understanding.” I’m quoting from memory. It sounds like something you might read anywhere.

A nagging sense of quotation, of living a life built on quotation marks haunts the novella. The speakers of his stories are troubled by the thought that their very human existence and their desires for creative expression have already been written and have found a home in someone else’s prose. The fear of living a life already recorded and already performed by literary archetypes creates a start-and-stop motion in Piccinnini’s prose.

Read the rest of the review on the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Screening of Tapan Sinha’s Kabuliwala (1957) – May 3

kabuliwalaRita Banerjee will introduce and lead the discussion for Tapan Sinha’s’s 1957 film, Kabuliwala, on Tuesday May 3 from 6-8:30 pm for the Institute for Indology and Tibetology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, (Ludwigstr. 31, Seminarraum 427).  The screening is part of the course Genre and Modern South Asian Literatures at LMU.  Anyone interested in genre, Modern South Asian literature, or art house film is welcomed to join the screening.

Rabindranath Tagore’s story Kabuliwala, set in the early twentieth century Kolkata, is about a little girl Mini and a merchant from Afghanistan affectionately called the “Kabuliwala.” Tapan Sinha’s adaptation of Tagore’s story explores the bonds of friendship, affection, and parting as Mini and the Kabuliwala strike up an unexpected rapport, and demonstrate how relationships can transcend the borders of race, religion, and language.

Science : Fiction – How to Build Literary Worlds – Munich Readery Creative Writing Workshop – April 30 [SOLD OUT]

ScienceFiction

Science : Fiction – How to Build Literary Worlds
Saturday April 30, 2016 * 9:00-12:00

The Munich Readery, Augustenstraße 104, 80798 München

In this class, we will explore how the fabric and rules of literary worlds in realist and speculative fiction are created.  By examining the parameters of social and behavioral codes, human interactions and psychology, and the materiality of worlds, we’ll explore that volatile space where truth and lie meet, where conflicts crystallize, and where storytelling disturbs and delights. If you’re currently working on a short story, novel, screenplay, theatrical play, lyrical essay, memoir, or narrative poem which has a unique literary world at its heart, come stop by the Munich Readery on Saturday April 30 for our next creative writing workshop led by Rita Banerjee.  To register, send an email to John by April 22 at: store@themunichreadery.com. Workshop Fee: €30.  This workshop is SOLD OUT.

Are You Afraid of the Dark? Writing What You Fear – Munich Readery Creative Writing Workshop – April 16

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Are You Afraid of the Dark? Writing What You Fear
Saturday April 16, 2016 * 9:00-12:00

The Munich Readery, Augustenstraße 104, 80798 München

In this workshop, writers will be invited to write about what they fear. We will begin by studying Lidia Yuknavitch’s personal essay, “Woven,” and Alexander Chee’s “My Parade,” and will discuss how nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and theatre can grapple with uncomfortable subjects and situations to illuminate conflicts, heighten drama, create complex characters, and reveal the human condition. In this class, writers will be invited to push their speakers and protagonists to face obstacles that they’re rather like to avoid or are afraid to encounter. We’ll study what makes a story compelling based on psychological, physical, spiritual, and emotional stakes. If you’re currently working on a short story, novel, screenplay, theatrical play, lyrical essay, memoir, or narrative poem which has a unique dilemma at is heart, come stop by the Munich Readery on Saturday April 16 for our next creative writing workshop led by Rita Banerjee.  Participation in this workshop is limited to 15, and advance registration is required. To register, send an email to Lisa by April 12 at: store@themunichreadery.com. Workshop Fee: €30.

 

Queen Mob’s Tea House features Rita Banerjee’s new fiction, “Darling Marie”

DarlingMarie
“This corner of Valencia seemed gray and abandoned but in the middle of all this nothingness, Marie could imagine that door, in another time, opening up into a dimly lit cigar-centered room, covered by umbrella lamps and French boudoir wallpaper.  The windows next to the entrance would be opaque and flickering…There was gunpowder and the unknown behind it, and in her hand, she held the black-lacquered fan and its secrets…”

The current issue of Queen Mob’s Tea House features Rita Banerjee’s neo-noir story, “Darling Marie.”

Rita Banerjee received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.  Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of BooksElectric Literature, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, AWP WC&C Quarterly, Riot Grrrl Magazine, Objet d’Art, and on KBOO Radio’s APA Compass in Portland, Oregon.  Her first collection of poems, Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press) received First Honorable Mention for Best Poetry Book of 2011-2012 at the Los Angeles Book Festival, and her novella, A Night with Kali (Spider Road Press), is forthcoming in 2016.  Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, she is currently working on a novel, a book on translation and modernisms, and a book of lyric essays.

Sabor y Cultura: Cambridge Writers’ Workshop AWP 2016 Reading – April 1

CWW-AWP2016ReadingThe Cambridge Writers’ Workshop is coming to Los Angeles for the AWP Conference (March 30 – April 2, 2016)!  Last year’s AWP  was a success with our bookfair table and reading at Boneshaker Books.  This year, you’ll be able to find us at Table 1157 and find information regarding our upcoming Spring in Newport, Rhode Island (April 22-25, 2016) Summer in Narbonne & Barcelona (July 18-26, 2016), and Summer in Granada, Spain (July  28-August 5, 2016) Writing Retreats.

We’ll also be hosting our AWP Reading at Sabor y Cultura (located at 5625 Hollywood BlvdLos Angeles, CA 90028) on Friday, April 1, 2016 from 4-7 pm.  Featured Readers include Rita BanerjeeJess BurnquistJulialicia CaseAriana KellyGwen E. KirbyKatie KnollEllaraine LockieOndrej PazdirekHeather Aimee O’NeillBrenda Peynado, Esther Pfaff, Jessica PiazzaJonathan ShapiroEmily Skaja, and Emily Smith.

 

Register for CWW Summer Writing Retreat in Barcelona & South of France by April 15!


The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Summer in Barcelona & Southern France Writing Retreat will take place from July 18-26, 2016.  The retreat will begin in Barcelona, Spain. There, you can engage in writing workshops while also taking in the Gaudi architecture, eating tapas, and enjoying the Spanish culture. After that, we’ll travel to Narbonne in the South of France. Located near the Mediterranean Sea, our writers will be able to enjoy the French summer and continue their writing projects in the picturesque town.  Faculty includes Bret Anthony Johnston(fiction), Heidi Pitlor (fiction, publishing), Lily Hoang (nonfiction, poetry), Diana Norma Szokolyai (poetry, nonfiction), and Rita Banerjee (poetry, fiction).  If you’d like to join us in Granada, please apply online at cww.submittable.com by April 15, 2015More info: cww.nyc 

Featured Faculty:

baj-bio-pic 2Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally best-selling novel Remember Me Like This, and author of  the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories, which was named a Best Book of the Year by The Independent (London) and The Irish Times, and the editor of Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His work appears in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Paris Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.  His awards include the Pushcart Prize, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, the Stephen Turner Award, the Cohen Prize, a James Michener Fellowship, the Kay Cattarulla Prize for short fiction, and many more. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, The Best American Sports Writing, and on NPR’s All Things Considered.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a 5 Under 35 honor from the National Book Foundation. He wrote the documentary film Waiting for Lightning, which was released in theaters around the world by Samuel Goldwyn Films. He teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars and at Harvard University, where he is the Director of Creative Writing.

49zoqdckHeidi Pitlor received her B.A. from McGill University in Montreal and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College. She eventually became an editor and later a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). She has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Ploughshares, The Huffington Post, and Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers.

 

 

lilyLily Hoang is the author of five books, including A Bestiary (winner of the inaugural Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Nonfiction Contest) and Changing (recipient of a PEN Open Books Award). With Joshua Marie Wilkinson, she edited the anthology The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. She is Director of the MFA program at New Mexico State University. She serves as Prose Editor at Puerto del Sol and Editor for Jaded Ibis Press.

 

DianaNormaDiana Norma Szkoloyai is author of the poetry books Roses in the Snow and Parallel Sparrows (Finishing Line Press). Her writing and hybrid art have appeared in Lyre Lyre, Dr. Hurley’s Snake Oil Cure, The Fiction Project, Teachers as Writers, Polarity, The Boston Globe, The Dudley Review, Up the Staircase, Area Zinc Art Magazine, Belltower & the Beach, and Human Rights News. Founding Literary Arts Director of Chagall Performance Art Collaborative and co-director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, she holds an Ed.M from Harvard and an M.A. in French Literature from the University of Connecticut.

 

RitaBanerjeeRita Banerjee received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.  Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of BooksElectric Literature, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, AWP WC&C Quarterly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Riot Grrrl Magazine, Poets for Living Waters, The Monarch Review, The Fiction Project, Quail Bell Magazine, Jaggery, Catamaran, The Crab Creek Review, The Dudley Review, Objet d’Art, Amethyst Arsenic, Vox Populi, Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure, Chrysanthemum, and on KBOO Radio’s APA Compass in Portland, Oregon.  Her first collection of poems, Cracklers at Night, was published by Finishing Line Press and received First Honorable Mention for Best Poetry Book of 2011-2012 at the Los Angeles Book Festival, and her novella, A Night with Kali, is forthcoming from Spider Road Press in 2016.  Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, she is currently working on a novel and a book of lyric essays.

 

Register for CWW Summer Writing Retreat in Granada, Andalucía, Spain by April 15!


The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Summer in Granada Writing Retreat will take place from July 28 – August 5, 2015 in Spain. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Andalucía, Granada is one of the gems of Spain and has inspired writers from Washington Irving to Salman Rushdie to Ali Smith. Let the old city stimulate your writing with its winding streets, Moorish history, and evocative landscapes. Or, indulge in delicious Andalucían cuisine and traditional Arab baths. Work on your existing manuscript, or look to the beauty and warmth of Granada to inspire all-new projects.  The retreat offers the opportunity for writers of all genres and levels to work alongside award-winning authors & editors to hone their craft and expand their writing skills, while working on new or existing projects.  Faculty includes Alexander Chee (fiction), Frederick-Douglass Knowles II (poetry, performance), Rita Banerjee (poetry, fiction), and Diana Norma Szokolyai (poetry, nonfiction).  If you’d like to join us in Granada, please apply online at cww.submittable.com by April 15, 2015,  More info: cww.nyc 

Featured Faculty:

cheeAlexander Chee was born in Rhode Island, and raised in South Korea, Guam and Maine. He is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Ledig House, the Hermitage and Civitella Ranieri. His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection. In 2003, Out Magazine honored him as one of their 100 Most Influential People of the Year. His essays and stories have appeared in Granta.com, Out, The Man I Might Become, Loss Within Loss, Men On Men 2000, His 3 and Boys Like Us. He has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at the New School University, Wesleyan University, Amherst College, and the Fiction program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in New York City and blogs at Koreanish.

Frederick-Douglass Knowles IIFDK is a poet, educator and activist involved in community education and the performing arts. He has competed on two National Poetry Slam Teams and served as the 2011 Connecticut Slam Team coach. His works have been featured in Poems on the Road to Peace: A Collective Tribute to Dr. King Volume 2Peabody Museum of Natural History by Yale University Press, The East Haddam Stage Company of Connecticut, The 13th Annual Acacia Group Conference at California State University, Folio –a Southern Connecticut State University literary magazine, Lefoko –a Botswana, Southern Africa Hip-Hop magazine and Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora by Third World Press. Frederick-Douglass is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Three Rivers Community College where he infuses English Composition with social injustice.

RitaBanerjeeRita Banerjee received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.  Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of BooksElectric Literature, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, AWP WC&C Quarterly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Riot Grrrl Magazine, Poets for Living Waters, The Monarch Review, The Fiction Project, Quail Bell Magazine, Jaggery, Catamaran, The Crab Creek Review, The Dudley Review, Objet d’Art, Amethyst Arsenic, Vox Populi, Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure, Chrysanthemum, and on KBOO Radio’s APA Compass in Portland, Oregon.  Her first collection of poems, Cracklers at Night, was published by Finishing Line Press and received First Honorable Mention for Best Poetry Book of 2011-2012 at the Los Angeles Book Festival, and her novella, A Night with Kali, is forthcoming from Spider Road Press in 2016.  Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, she is currently working on a novel and a book of lyric essays.

DianaNormaDiana Norma Szkoloyai is author of the poetry books Roses in the Snow and Parallel Sparrows (Finishing Line Press). Her writing and hybrid art have appeared in Lyre Lyre, Dr. Hurley’s Snake Oil Cure, The Fiction Project, Teachers as Writers, Polarity, The Boston Globe, The Dudley Review, Up the Staircase, Area Zinc Art Magazine, Belltower & the Beach, and Human Rights News. Founding Literary Arts Director of Chagall Performance Art Collaborative and co-director of the Cambridge Writer’s Workshop, she holds an Ed.M from Harvard and an M.A. in French Literature from the University of Connecticut.

Queen Mob’s Tea House features Rita Banerjee’s Poem, “Birds on Blue”

QueenMobs-RitaBanerjee“Is it not sweet to think that, if only you have patience,
all that has ever been will come back to you?” —Isak Dinesen

The current issue of Queen Mob’s Tea House features Rita Banerjee’s jazzy atomic-age poem, “Birds on Blue.”

Rita Banerjee received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.  Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of BooksElectric Literature, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, AWP WC&C Quarterly, Riot Grrrl Magazine, Objet d’Art, and on KBOO Radio’s APA Compass in Portland, Oregon.  Her first collection of poems, Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press) received First Honorable Mention for Best Poetry Book of 2011-2012 at the Los Angeles Book Festival, and her novella, A Night with Kali (Spider Road Press), is forthcoming in 2016.  Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, she is currently working on a novel, a book on translation and modernisms, and a book of lyric essays.

“Encountering Allen Ginsberg: The South Asian Avant-Garde Response to the Beats” – ACLA, Harvard University – March 18

BENARES, INDIA - FEBRUARY 1963: Beat poet Allen Ginsberg points at art poster during February 1963 in his tenement apartment near the banks of the Ganges river in Benaras, India. Ginsberg explored Eastern philosophies with Peter Orlovsky and other founders of the Beat movement during his March '62 - May '63 stay. (Photo by Pete turner/Getty Images)

Presented by Dr. Rita Banerjee
Cross-Cultural Values: Confluences and Conflicts
Friday March 18, 2016 * 2:00 – 3:45 pm
Emerson Hall, Room 307, Harvard University

In the early 1960s, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder travelled extensively across India and met with several avant-garde South Asian writer groups such as the Krittibās and Hungry Generation writers in Bengali, the Nayī Kavitā poets in Hindi, and with P. Lal’s English-language Writers Workshop group. This paper will examine the ways in which the South Asian avant-garde interpreted, welcomed, and/or challenged the Asia-oriented gaze of Allen Ginsberg and his fellow Beats. The complicated South Asian response to the Beat Generation will be investigated through examples of literary criticism, translation, and first-hand accounts of the Beats as produced by modernist, Hungry Generation, and post-Independence confessionalist writers in Hindi, Bengali, and Indian English.