As part of the NYS Writers Institute’s fall season of visiting writers, Paul La Farge, novelist, essayist, and short story writer will be presenting both a seminar at 4:15PM and a reading at 8:00PM this coming Thursday, September 27 at Assembly Hall in the Campus Center on the Uptown Campus of SUNY Albany.

Paul La Farge is the author of a much-talked-about new work of fiction and electronic media, Luminous Airplanes (2012), the story of a young man who returns to his family home in the Catskills after his grandfather’s death in order to purge the house of “five generations of junk.” This highly original work is published both as a conventional print novel and as an ever-expanding, electronic “immersive text.” Bestselling humorist Gary Shteyngart calls it, “one of the best works of fiction to come my way in a long time…. a quiet triumph of a book.” La Farge’s earlier novels include Haussmann, or the Distinction (2001), and The Artist of the Missing (1999).

What is an immersive text? Author Paul La Farge talks with Amanda Stern about Luminous Airplanes, which is both a novel and a large online fiction. Hal Hartley directs.

These events are co-sponsored by UAlbany’s Center for Jewish Studies. Both events will feature a multimedia presentation. The events are in association with an academic conference on the life and work of philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin: “Critical Speculations – Future Worlds, Perilous History, and Walter Benjamin Unbound.”

For more information, contact the Writers Institute at writers@albany.edu or 442-5620.