News and Events

A Reading by Karan Mahajan

The Bard Fiction Prize winner and National Book Award finalist Karan Mahajan reads from his work.

Monday, February 26, 2018

2:30 pm EST/GMT-5

Campus Center, Weis Cinema

On Monday, February 26, at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center, novelist Karan Mahajan reads from his work. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, and followed by a Q&A, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

Karan Mahajan studied English and economics at Stanford University before earning an M.F.A. in fiction from the Michener Center for Writers. His first novel, Family Planning (2012), was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs (2016), won the Bard Fiction Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, and the NYPL Young Lions Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, in addition to being named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Esquire, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and others. In 2017, Mahajan was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.

PRAISE FOR KARAN MAHAJAN

“The Association of Small Bombs is wonderful. It is smart, devastating, unpredictable, and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout. . . . Mahajan is the real deal.” —Fiona Maazel, New York Times Book Review

“A voracious approach to fiction-making . . . Mahajan has a cinematic attunement to the spectacle of disaster.” —New Yorker

“Mahajan is an incredibly assured stylist. . . . Hugely promising.” —Jay McInerney, Daily Beast

“Even when handling the darkest material or picking through confounding emotional complexities, Mahajan maintains a light touch and a clarity of vision.” —London Review of Books

“Mahajan . . . has already developed an irresistible voice with a rich sense of humor fueled by sorrow.” —Washington Post Book World

Contact: Nicole Nyhan, [email protected], 845-758-7054

Connect

In Print

Conjunctions:79

Onword

Fall 2022
Edited by Bradford Morrow

Online

Hunger

by Shane Kowalski

March 15, 2023

He’s been coming around a lot but I’ve only recently started calling the dog Jesus because if Jesus were to return, this is how he would do it. In this shape, in this form, in these times. I’m sure of it. My best and only friend, Holy Amy, who thinks of herself as a kind of very powerful and sexually budding nun, disagrees. She says Jesus would return in the form of a handsome kisser, not some ugly mutt. Someone with a beautiful face, so we would know it was him. I say he’s not ugly. She says I am “vexed,” “cursed,” and that I am doomed to repeat the mistakes of those before me, though I’m not sure whom she’s talking about. All I know is it’s true: he’s not ugly. The dog suit he wears isn’t even a dog suit.

Every Friday Nite is Kiddies Nite

by Tennessee Williams

March 8, 2023

When the Reverend Houston was seventy he was retired from the ministry with a pension, paid by the national church organization, that was slightly in excess of the salary he had been receiving for nearly fifty years from his parish at New Babylon, Missouri. There were no strings attached to this pension. He could do with it and with himself, thereafter, practically anything that pleased his rational fancy. Naturally enough, he quit preaching. He had been preaching for nearly fifty years and he was getting just as tired of it as his congregation was. One Sunday morning during the summer of his seventieth year he shook hands with his successor, a vigorous young man who would attract plenty of spinsters to the Sunday-school faculty, walked calmly out of the church and never returned.

The Last Ones

by Yuri Herrera

March 1, 2023

He walked for two years across the putrid surface of the solid crust: he learned how not to die by gnawing on it and how not to dissolve in its salt at night; he healed his own bones when the wind whipped him through the air like a rag and flung him onto the stiff waves.
He was perpetually dazzled by the glare, but every once in a while he glimpsed shadows beneath the crust, brooding their bodies from one side to another and bashing themselves against the surface.
Once he caught sight of an old man, inexplicably gleeful, jigging from one little plastic islet to the next. They waved at each other, arms aloft; he managed to make out the other man’s silhouette, stretched tall against the glare of the crust, and at that precise moment an enormous, jagged mouth rose up around the old man’s feet and carried him down to the depths of that filthy chowder.