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    Arts

    The Archive Project

    In partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting, Literary Arts is building a retrospective of some of the most engaging talks from the world’s best writers over the first 40 years of Portland Arts & Lectures in Portland.

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    Latest Episodes:
    David Levithan, Michelle Tea, & William Ritter Jan 29, 2016
    Show notes

    In Another Day, best-selling author David Levithan tells the story from the side of Every Day’s Rhiannon as she seeks to discover the truth about love and how it can change you. Girl at the Bottom of the Sea, Michelle Tea’s sequel to Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, finds our hero Sophie traveling from Massachusetts to Poland with her unlikely guardian, the mermaid Syrena. And in Beastly Bones, the follow-up book to the acclaimed Jackaby, William Ritter tells of a supernatural investigation from the perspective of Abigail Rook, R.F. Jackaby’s assistant. Alison Clement, author of Twenty Questions, moderates this panel.

    “They like knowing there are other cultures in the world, and they rally at the opportunity to think about other societies and other ways of thinking about things. And when we only focus on one—just Western society—we miss out on lots of really cool philosophical ways of thinking about the world.” – William Ritter, on teaching world mythologies

    “It is a really sweet feeling to create characters and then get to keep returning to them.” – Michelle Tea, on writing a sequel or series

    “You may deploy this amazing metaphor [in your manuscript], and you’re like, ‘Wow! I’ve seen everything in a new light because of this amazing articulation that is so brilliant.’ And then when you’re revising, you’re like, ‘There is no way this character would ever have thought that.’ And so you have to kill your darling.” – David Levithan, on character and voice

    David Levithan is the author of numerous books for young adults, including Boy Meets Boy, the Lambda Literary Award winner Two Boys Kissing, and Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, which was adapted into a film starring Michael Cera. Levithan is an editorial director at Scholastic and the founding editor of its PUSH imprint, which is devoted to finding new voices and new authors in teen literature. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

    Michelle Tea is an author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose work often explores queer culture, feminism, race, class, and prostitution, among other topics. Her award-winning memoir, Valencia, was adapted into a feature length film shot by 21 independent filmmakers as a collaborative film-arts project. Tea is the founder of the literary nonprofit RADAR Productions and the co-founder of the infamous spoke word tour, Sister Spit. She lives in San Francisco.

    William Ritter is the author of two Young Adult novels, Jackaby and its sequel, Beastly Bones. He is a graduate of the University of Oregon and currently teaches high school language arts and mythology. When reading aloud, he always does the voices. He lives in Springfield, Oregon.

    The moderator of this panel is Alison Clement. She is the author of Pretty is As Pretty Does and Twenty Questions, which won the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction through the Oregon Book Awards in 2007. Before earning her Master’s Degree, Clement had dropped out of college after reading Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society and worked a variety of jobs, including selling underground newspapers in Madison, Wisconsin; managing an occult bookstore in Normal, Illinois; and panhandling in San Francisco. She now teaches composition at a small, rural community college in Oregon.


    Diana Nyad & Cheryl Strayed Jan 23, 2016
    Show notes

    At the age of sixty-four, long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad became the first person to swim the 111 miles from Cuba to Key West without a shark cage, a Herculean feat that had eluded her when she made the attempt three decades earlier, in peak form. Nyad discusses her new memoir, Find a Way, a passionate story of this heroic adventure and the extraordinary life experiences that have served to carve her unwavering spirit, with Cheryl Strayed (Brave Enough).

    Always that swim has been for me about living large, about turning 60 and feeling the grip of existential angst—Who am I? And I the person I can admire?—much more than an endurance event. And the people who were on the beach that day—the crying, weeping thousands of people, and the millions of people who have gotten a hold of me—they’re not [all] swimming fans . . . They’re people who want to live that message: You never, ever give up and you will get to your other shore. – Diana Nyad

    Two hours before the end of this thing, now the palm trees are in full sight. And I asked my team—it’s 44 people, this is a true expedition: you’ve got Dr. Angel Yanagihara, the world’s leading box jellyfish expert from University of Hawaii; you’ve got your shark team, which I mentioned earlier; you’ve got a navigation team (this is an extremely difficult mathematical navigation); you’ve got the medical team; I’ve got my own personal team, which is nutrition and rousing that drop of courage when you don’t think you have anything left—it’s a big expedition. And two hours from the end, more of less, when we’re pretty sure we’re making it to the end, I ask my team to come over and make a semi-circle of boats, and we stop. And I cried like a baby. And I said, ‘You know, I guess I’m going to stumble up on that beach pretty soon, and I guess somebody is going to take my picture, but don’t you ever forget—because I will never forget—that we did this together. We made history together. – Diana Nyad

    On September 2, 2013, at the age of sixty-four, Diana Nyad swam the 111 miles from Havana to Key West in fifty-three hours, becoming the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without the aid of a shark cage. For those already familiar with Nyad—whether as an author, journalist, motivational speaker, or long-distance swimmer—this was the fruition of a long-anticipated dream. Nyad first gained national attention in 1975, when she completed a record-breaking swim around Manhattan, and then again in 1979, when she swam from The Bahamas to Florida and set a world record for distance swimming over open water. It was at this time that she also made her first attempt at the Cuba-to-Florida swim, but was thwarted by unfavorable winds after 76 miles. In the thirty-year interim between the height of her swimming career and her 2013 feat, Nyad was a sports broadcaster and journalist for such media as NPR and ABC’S “Wide World of Sports,” among others. She is the author of four books, including her most recent memoir, Find a Way: One Wild and Precious Life, which details her multiple attempts and eventual success at the Cuba-to-Florida swim. Of the book, People Magazine wrote, “It reads like a gripping thriller. Nyad is living proof that, as she says, ‘You can live out your dreams if you refuse to ever, ever give up.’”

    Cheryl Strayed catapulted into fame in 2012 with her #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which went on to be adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern. Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay, and Jean-Marc Vallée directed the film. Strayed followed up this book with two more New York Times bestsellers: Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of essays compiled from Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” advice column in The Rumpus; and Brave Enough, a collection of quotes drawn from her previous writings. Strayed co-hosts the WBUR podcast Dear Sugar Radio, and her essays have been published in The Best American Essays, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, Salon, and Tin House, among others. She is a long-time activist for women’s rights, including abortion rights and women in the arts. Of her writing, George Sanders has said, “Big-hearted, keen-eyed, lyrical, precise…Cheryl Strayed reminds us in every line that if defeat and despair are part of human experience, so are kindness, patience, and transcendence.”


    Stacy Schiff & Karen Karbo Jan 20, 2016
    Show notes

    One of the most acclaimed contemporary historians presents a fresh, startling new look at the Salem witch trials, the first great American mystery. In The Witches: Salem, 1692, Pulitzer Prize winning author Stacy Schiff examines the religious, social, and political context of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that doomed year, the only moment when women played the central role in American history. Schiff is interviewed by Karen Karbo, author Julia Child Rules and the forthcoming In Praise of Difficult Women.

    “There’s so much of this particular tragedy that is seminal and sort of hardwired into our DNA. And one does wonder if the fact that these people are exceedingly litigious might explain something. They are always in court, and in fact very few people who are accused during the trials have not already been in court for some other reason.” – Stacy Schiff

    “Reading those quarterly court cases is really fascinating, because you begin to see how contentious relationships were, where the fault lines are, how easily and often people sued—and you realize there’s a lot of unfinished business here, which obviously witchcraft will help to finish off.” – Stacy Schiff

    Stacy Schiff has been called “that rare combination: a first-rate historian and a brilliant storyteller.” Her 2000 biography on Vera Nabokov—the wife of author Vladimir Nabokov—won the Pulitzer Prize, and her 2010 biography on Cleopatra has been praised as “a masterpiece.” In her newest publication, The Witches: Salem, 1692, Schiff presents a fresh, startling new look at the Salem witch trials, examining the religious, social, and political context of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that doomed year. Of this work, historian and writer David McCullough has said, “History in the hands of Stacy Schiff is invariably full of life, light, shadow, surprise, clarity of insight, and so it is again and then some in her latest work, The Witches. Few writers combine as she does superb scholarship and an exceptional gift for language with amazing reach and agility of mind. This is a superb book.” Schiff has received numerous awards and currently serves as a guest columnist for The New York Times, and her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among other publications.

    Karen Karbo, who interviewed Schiff, is the author of fourteen award-winning books, most notably including the best-selling “Kick-Ass Women” series featuring Julia Child, Georgia O’Keeffe, Coco Chanel, and Audrey Hepburn. Her 2004 memoir, The Stuff of Life, about the last year she spent with her father before his death, was a New York Times Notable Book, a People Magazine Critics’ Choice, and an Oregon Book Award winner. Her writing has appeared in Elle, Vogue, Esquire, Outside, The New York Times, and Salon.com, among others. Karbo was one of 24 writers awarded an Amtrak Residency, and she currently serves on the Literary Arts Board of Directors.


    Ruth Reichl (Rebroadcast) Jan 11, 2016
    Show notes

    Acclaimed chef and food writer Ruth Reichl discusses the highlights of her career as a food writer, including how she got her start, her current work, and some of the lessons she has learned along the way. She explains how the many illusions of the fine dining world have taught her a lot about herself.

    An acclaimed chef and food writer, Ruth Reichl served as a restaurant critic for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and was Gourmet magazine’s editor-in-chief for ten years. As the co-owner of The Swallow Restaurant during the mid 70s, Reichl was also part of the culinary revolution that took place in Berkeley, California. In pursuit of her goal to demystify the world of fine cuisine, Reichl has been praised for her honest writing, including her examination of the sexism experienced by women at restaurants and the pretentious nature of many of New York’s dining establishments. Her books include Tender at the Bone; Comfort Me with Apples, Garlic and Sapphires; and For You Mom, Finally—which have collectively been translated into 18 languages. Her latest publication and first novel, Delicious!, was published by Random House in 2014. The recipient of 6 James Beard Awards, Reichl is currently the executive producer of PBS’s Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie, the host of PBS’s Gourmet’s Adventures With Ruth, a judge on Top Chef Masters, and the culinary editor for the Modern Library Food Series.

    We all have a contract with an expensive restaurant. You agree to pay them a lot of money. They, in turn, agree to feed you lovely food and provide you with the illusion, if only for a few hours, that you are a person who lives a privileged life. If they’re going to take your money, they not only have to feed you well, they have to make you feel good.”

    “I began to understand that the costumes had been much more to me than just props for eating out. They had allowed me anonymity, yes, but they had also provided an illusion that was much more long lasting than the one you get from a restaurant. For the first time in my life I understood, really understood, how it felt to be someone else. And, then, the most amazing thing happened: in becoming other people, I discovered myself.”

    “I feel that I learned to tell stories at my family table. We sat down to dinner together, and we were expected to have a good story about what happened that day—to be able to turn your day, no matter what had happened, into a story. The lesson there is that everybody’s day is interesting. Every day is interesting. It’s just how you tell it. And I do think that in learning to tell stories, you learn to be a writer. And it’s just one of the many reasons that I think family meals are so important.”


    Jon Krakauer & Barry Lopez Jan 06, 2016
    Show notes

    Critically acclaimed, best-selling authors Jon Krakauer (Missoula, Into the Wild, and more) and Barry Lopez (Outside: Stories, Arctic Dreams, and more) are known for writing about human nature in confrontation with the natural world: from summiting Everest to our relationships with wolves and everything in between. In this conversation at the 2015 Portland Book Festival (formerly Wordstock), the two American literary legends discuss both the raw natural world and the interior nature of humanity.

    With Arctic Dreams, I loved so fiercely where I was and the people who opened the doors so I could see it better…and my belief really was that if I could do the right kind of work, it would help people understand the grace in their own interiors.” – Barry Lopez

    “There’s something about putting yourself at the mercy of nature, where the risks are real, that enforces a certain humility that is valuable.” – Jon Krakauer

    Jon Krakauer spent his childhood in Corvallis, Oregon. At the age of eight, he began mountaineering with his father. This activity sparked a lifelong obsession with wilderness landscapes, and in 1996, Krakauer set forth to climb Mt Everest. While he and his five companions successfully reached the summit together, only Krakauer and one other climber made it back down the mountainside, a harrowing experienced he shares in his 1997 New York Times bestseller, Into Thin Air. Krakauer’s other nonfiction books include Into the Wild, which spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith; and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, for which Krakauer spent five months embedded with combat forces along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. His most recent book, Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, was published in April. Krakauer is the recipient of a National Magazine Award and an Academy Award in Literature. Of his work, the American Academy of Arts and Letters has stated, “Krakauer combines the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer.” His writing has appeared in Outside, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker, among others.

    Barry Lopez moved to Oregon in 1968, after dividing his childhood between Southern California and New York City, as well as a brief stint in the Midwest for college. His nonfiction often explores the relationship between physical landscapes and human cultures. His books include the National Book Award winner Arctic Dreams and the National Book Award finalist Of Wolves and Men. He has also written eight books of fiction, published two collections of essays, and is a regular contributor to Harper’s, Granta, Outside, and The Paris Review, among others. His most recent work is the short story collection Outside, which incorporates engravings by Barry Moser. Lopez is the recipient of numerous major literary and cultural awards, including an Academy Award in Literature and Pushcart Prizes in fiction and nonfiction, and his writing has taken him to more than 90 countries. Of his work, The New York Times has stated, “Mr. Lopez’s tone is intimate, inviting, as if his words shared the air with the snap and hiss of a campfire.”


    Robert Pinsky Jan 04, 2016
    Show notes

    Robert Pinsky begins his lecture by discussing the physicality of poetry. He compares poetry to other modern mediums of creativity and argues that poetry is uniquely intimate because it only reaches full expression in the body of the recipient. Pinsky goes on to discuss the special position of poetry in America: that it often produces ideas on an individual level before they are absorbed into systems of mass culture. Pinsky finishes his lecture by discussing the Favorite Poem Project, which called upon Americans from various backgrounds to submit their favorite poem and a brief statement on its significance.

    “I believe that the human craving for art is bottomless and tremendous, so I don’t that think poetry or any other art is threatened by the presence of other arts.”

    “The notion that the art of poetry doesn’t need equipment, doesn’t need mass-production, doesn’t need a skilled performer, doesn’t need the presence of the poet, is for me an important notion about our culture.”

    “You’re keeping alive something you got from dead people—people like Yeats and Dickinson and your teachers, who eventually will die. And then you’re going to hand it on to other people, some of whom are not even born yet, and say to them ‘take care of this.’”

    Robert Pinsky served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997-2000. Some critics regard him as the last of the “civic” or public poets. In an interview for Christian Science Monitor, he stated, “I think poetry is a vital part of our intelligence, our ability to learn, our ability to remember, the relationship between our bodies and minds. Poetry’s highest purpose is to provide a unique sensation of coordination between the intelligence, emotions, and the body. It’s one of the most fundamental pleasures a person can experience.” During his tenure as Poet Laureate, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, which invited ordinary Americans to name their favorite poems and read them for a permanent audio archive at the Library of Congress. Pinsky’s initial goal was to record 100 people, but he soon found himself overwhelmed by the correspondence he received from people of all ages, locations, educations, and socioeconomic status asking to be included in the project. In addition to his acclaimed poetry collections, Pinsky has been praised by critics for his 1994 English translation of Dante’s Inferno. He is the author of nineteen books and currently teaches at Boston University.


    Naomi Shihab Nye Dec 22, 2015
    Show notes

    A William Stafford devotee and former mentee, Naomi Shihab Nye opens her lecture by reading from Stafford’s “Time for Serenity, Anyone?” She then discusses the countless ways his work has inspired her and the poets around her. Afterwards, she reads several poems from her most recent collection at the time, Fuel: Poems, many of which focus on the simplicity of everyday life and which contain elements of the Southwest culture in which she spends the majority of her time.

    “Sometimes it seems to me, traveling around, that one of the most enduring and comforting families that any of us can have is the family of people who hearken to the same voice over time, who return to the same voices for sustenance.”

    Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent 40 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspire students of all ages. Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to a shared humanity. She is the author or editor of more than 30 publications, including her poetry collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her new novel for children, The Turtle of Oman, which was chosen as a 2015 Notable Children’s Book by the American Library Association. She has been a poetry editor at The Texas Observer for 20 years, serves on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, and was recently named laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Award for Children’s Literature.

    “As a child, the library was our sanctuary and we went there religiously. We checked out as much as we could, we kept as long as we could, and we all felt equally rich there.”

    “I like it when people for whom English is not a native language say unusual words. It gives me a new sense of the dictionary.”


    Mary Gordon & Frank McCourt Dec 18, 2015
    Show notes

    Mary Gordon begins the lecture by discussing how writers of autobiography or memoir often depend on memory to portray the truth. In the case of her own writing, Gordon says memory takes the form of specific images that have stuck with her throughout the years. She reads a selection of excerpts from her work that focus on an image or a concrete moment embedded in her childhood memories. She goes on to talk about the years she spent researching her family’s roots, imagining herself in her father’s place or inhabiting the hundreds of memories she has from her childhood in order to go about writing her memoir. Frank McCourt shares how writing Angela’s Ashes was the main goal he had in his life, saying that he knew it was something he had to put into the world or else he would go crazy. He discusses the poverty of his childhood and what it was like to grow up in Ireland during such difficult times, touching on how the state of the country, his alcoholic father, and the family’s failed attempt at American life had set them all up for disaster.

    Mary Gordon is an American writer and professor of English at Barnard College. Over the past four decades, she has published novels, story collections, memoirs, essays, and biographies. Her first novel, Final Payments, was published in 1978 to tremendous critical acclaim and quickly followed by The Company of Women in 1981. Since then, she has published more than a dozen books on a wide range of subjects and won some of the country’s highest honors. She is best known today for her nonfiction writing, which focuses on her parents and childhood. In 2006, The Stories of Mary Gordon, including new and old works, was published and received The Story Prize in 2007.

    Frank McCourt’s story is best gleaned from the pages of his memoir trilogy: Angela’s Ashes, Tis, and Teacher Man. These three books chronicle McCourt’s life—from his impoverished childhood in Ireland to his rich teaching career in America—and were all written after his retirement. Selling more than 5 million copies, Angela’s Ashes won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and was made into a feature film only three years after its publication. In addition to his 30 years as a high school English teacher, McCourt served in the Korean War. He died in 2009 at the age of 78.

    One of the important ways that I knew the world was through images. The memories that seemed both most potent and most trustworthy to me were memories that had their genesis in images.” – Mary Gordon

    “We want to flatten things out. We want things to be as simple as possible. It seems to me the great growth in the appetite for fundamentalism is an appetite to make things simpler than they really are, because the complexity of life can be unbearable to us.” – Mary Gordon

    “When you left Ireland, you left forever. They had an Irish wake. That meant you were going to die; you might as well be dead.” – Frank McCourt

    “American kids feared failing or getting a B minus…or not being able to get a date for the prom, but we feared hell. We had more cosmic aspirations.” – Frank McCourt


    Azar Nafisi Dec 17, 2015
    Show notes

    This episode of The Archive Project features Azar Nafisi, author of the acclaimed Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. In her lecture, Nafisi discusses Iranian literature and how it serves as a source of identity. She examines the fundamentalist Muslim identity in comparison to the national identity, concluding that people must focus on the literature of a nation in order to truly understand a culture. She also reflects on her life in England and her personal need to preserve Iran in her memory, and how that drive ultimately lead her to fall in love with fiction.

    “The worst crime you can commit is to be blind towards others—to impose the dreams you have on the reality of other people.”

    “Fiction is so important because against the fragility and fickleness of life, literature preserves all the passing moments that are constantly dying and we are constantly losing.”

    “The way I discovered what Nabokov calls a ‘portable world’ is of course through literature and art. I didn’t know much about England, and my classmates didn’t know much about Iran, but I knew about Great Expectations, and I knew about Pride and Prejudice—so that is how I made my home in England and, later, in America.”

    Azar Nafisi is an acclaimed writer, journalist, teacher, and activist. Her most famous book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is a memoir about her experience as an educator during the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The book spent 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into 32 languages. Nafisi’s teaching experience includes Oxford University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Tehran, where she advocated for Iranian intellectuals and youth, specifically young women. Nafisi was dismissed from the University of Tehran in 1981 for her refusal to wear the mandatory Islamic veil. She returned to the United States in 1997 and began working on Reading Lolita in Tehran, writing, “I left Iran, but Iran did not leave me.” Nafisi’s essays have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and her 1999 cover story for The New Republic, “The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution’s Woman Problem,” has been reprinted into several different languages. Her 2014 book, The Republic of Imagination, examines the vital importance of fiction in a democratic society and serves as a long-awaited companion piece to Reading Lolita in Tehran.


    Amos Oz (Rebroadcast) Dec 11, 2015
    Show notes

    In this episode of The Archive Project, Israeli writer Amos Oz discusses Israeli Literature, Hebrew as a spoken and written language, the influence of the Holocaust on literature, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

    “I love Israel, even at times that I don’t like it. In fact, I love Israel even at times that I cannot stand it. And Israel, as I’m sure you know, ladies and gentlemen, Israel is neither a country, nor a nation. Actually, it is a fiery collection of arguments. A noisy assembly of 5.6 million citizens, 5.6 million Prime Ministers, 5.6 million prophets and Messiahs, each with his or her own personal formula for instant redemption.”

    “I know the word compromise has a terrible reputation in English, especially on the West Coast. This is the place of idealists, and they regard compromise as lack of principles, lack of backbone, lack of integrity, lack of devotion, lack of everything. Let me tell you, in my vocabulary, the word compromise is synonymous to the word life itself. And the opposite of compromise is not integrity, and the opposite of compromise is not idealism—the opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death. Where there is life, there is compromise. Compromise, not capitulation.”

    “In the 50s, pulses of guilt and dread and uneasiness and social anger and political rebelliousness reappeared in the literature and very strongly. Since the 60’s, roughly, one can decipher a significant comeback of themes, melodies that used to be attached to the previous generations. That basic Hebrew context seems to reappear vigorously on the scene with poets and novelists who are survivors of the Nazi massacre…the persistent fear of an approaching disaster, longings for far away places, skepticism, irony, even self-hatred. Political siege conceived as an emotional siege, persistent, tormented sense of moral ambiguity, and ultimately, the pulses of a secret theological quest.”

    Amos Oz, born Amos Klausner, is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work examines Israeli culture. Educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Oxford, Oz served in the Israeli army during three separate stints and joined the Israeli peace movement following the Six-Day War in 1967. It was at this time that he began advocating for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Oz’s fiction combines realism with irony, resulting in a critical, unapologetic tone. He credits Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio with his choice to write about his own experiences and point of view. “The written world,” he wrote in his memoir, “always revolves around the hand that is writing, wherever it happens to be writing: where you are is the center of the universe.” Oz has published 38 works of fiction and nonfiction, has had his work translated into 42 languages, and has won literary prizes from around the world. In addition to writing, Oz has worked as a teacher and a laborer and is currently a professor emeritus at Ben-Gurion University.


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