Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House
58 West 10th Street
212.998.8850
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Amy Hempel
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Friday Feb 29, 2008 (7pm)
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Amy Hempel's short stories are at once highly specific — full of vintage pop-culture references and quirky anecdotal information — and obstinately vague, with entire narratives often seeming to float inside her narrators' heads. In her story, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried," the narrator obsesses over meaningless trivia: "In my head there are bath towels swaddling this stuff," she says. "Nothing else seeps through." Because of all the "bath towels" obscuring her meaning, Hempel's stories are rich with tangents that merit pursuit in a second (or third) reading. Tonight, Hempel talks to a fellow fiction writer — NYU's Darin Strauss — as part of the New Salon, hosted by the university's creative-writing program.
