Robert Coover Tribute at AWP Conference in Washington DC

Robert Coover, author of Noir and over twenty other acclaimed works of fiction, will be at the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) Conference in Washington this week. AWP holds its Annual Conference & Bookfair in a different region of North America in order to celebrate the outstanding authors, teachers, writing programs, literary centers, and small press publishers of that region. The Annual Conference typically features 350 presentations: readings, lectures, panel discussions, and Forums plus hundreds of book signings, receptions, dances, and informal gatherings. The conference will host a tribute to Robert Coover this year, and the full schedule is now available.

Robert Coover has received many prizes for his many novels and short story collections, including the Faulkner Award, the Rhea Lifetime Achievement Award, and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. At Brown University, he teaches Cave Writing (a writing workshop in immersive virtual reality), and directs the International Writers Project, a freedom-to-write program. Last year, The Overlook Press published its first book by this distinguished author: Noir, a true page-turner - wry, absurd, and desolate - which finds this American master at the top of his form.

PW Starred Review: Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture

We were thrilled to see Publishers Weekly award a starred review to NORMAN FOSTER: A LIFE IN ARCHITECTURE. This professional biography was one of our most interesting books of the fall season, and this review nails why people responded to Foster's life story so well, regardless of their taste in architecture or knowledge of the field today. Thanks, PW!

Web Exclusive Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture

Deyan Sudjic, Overlook, $37.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-59020-432-0

Though Sudjic (The Language of Things) takes readers on an engrossing tour of Foster's life as a renowned architect, it's the exquisite attention to detail in recounting that life--particularly the childhood–that brings this book to such vibrant life. Foster came from humble means; growing up in England's Crescent Grove--"unmistakably on the wrong side of the tracks"--left a lasting impression on Foster. His working class parents "had failed in what they wanted to do with their lives," Foster believed. Following his education at Manchester, he turned down a Fulbright scholarship because he didn't think it offered the "flexibility to work" and instead pursued the Henry Fellowship, which led him to study architecture at Yale. In the United States Foster was thrilled to "reinvent himself." Sudjic, director of London's Design Museum, does a remarkable job examining influences, Buckminster Fuller among them, who "gave Foster the ambition about what architecture might be" and deftly describes the irony of Foster's fame as the architect of influential buildings like the Hong Kong Bank which, though it elevated Foster to international acclaim, came at such great expense that it did little to make him more employable. Photos. (Sept.)

Norman Foster's Masdar development featured in the New York Times

Have you picked up a copy of Deyan Sudjic's new biography of architect Norman Foster? If not, this article from Sunday's New York Times should definitely pique your interest in the book. While NORMAN FOSTER: A LIFE IN ARCHITECTURE is primarily a professional biography, it also discusses Foster's idealism, design aesthetic and the Masdar development that received so much attention from the Times. Go here to read the full article, and check out a brief excerpt below!

Back in 2007, when the government here announced its plan for “the world’s first zero-carbon city” on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, many Westerners dismissed it as a gimmick — a faddish follow-up to neighboring Dubai’s half-mile-high tower in the desert and archipelago of man-made islands in the shape of palm trees.

Designed by Foster & Partners, a firm known for feats of technological wizardry, the city, called Masdar, would be a perfect square, nearly a mile on each side, raised on a 23-foot-high base to capture desert breezes. Beneath its labyrinth of pedestrian streets, a fleet of driverless electric cars would navigate silently through dimly lit tunnels. The project conjured both a walled medieval fortress and an upgraded version of the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland.

Well, those early assessments turned out to be wrong. By this past week, as people began moving into the first section of the project to be completed — a 3 ½-acre zone surrounding a sustainability-oriented research institute — it was clear that Masdar is something more daring and more noxious.

Norman Foster, the firm’s principal partner, has blended high-tech design and ancient construction practices into an intriguing model for a sustainable community, in a country whose oil money allows it to build almost anything, even as pressure grows to prepare for the day the wells run dry. And he has worked in an alluring social vision, in which local tradition and the drive toward modernization are no longer in conflict — a vision that, at first glance, seems to brim with hope.

Continued here.