Center for the literary arts in New York State
BRILLIANT AND DIFFICULT FRIENDS
Robert Boyers
4:30 p.m. Tuesday, October 24, 2023
Multi-Purpose Room, Campus Center West Addition
University at Albany
1400 Washington Avenue, Albany NY 12222 See map.
Robert Boyers presents Maestros & Monsters: Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner (2023) an account of his 50-year friendship with two of the most influential literary critics of the last 100 years and strong personalities who frequently clashed with one other. Garth Greenwell called it, “A delicious portrait of two difficult brilliant intellectuals, and a spirited vindication of criticism as a noble calling.”
A professor at Skidmore College, Boyers is co-founder and director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute in Saratoga Springs and editor of the quarterly magazine Salmagundi, founded in 1965 and published since 1969. He is the author of 11 books, including The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies (2019); The Dictator’s Dictation: The Politics of Novels and Novelists (2005); and Excitable Women, Damaged Men (2005), A Book of Common Praise (2002), and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The Nation, and many other publications.
Cosponsored by the English Department’s Creative Writing Program and Young Writers Project.