Imagination, personal experience, and lucid prose complement the in-depth research and stealthy dose of satire in Severance, Ling Ma’s debut novel, which just received the 2018 Kirkus Prize for fiction. Expanded from what originally began as a short story, her book was selected from 1,193 books published during the past year. Each winning author of the Kirkus Prize receives $50,000 and widespread renown in the book publishing world.
Gabriel Richardson Lear, professor in the Department of Philosophy, the Committee on Social Thought, and the College, will deliver the Aims of Education address to incoming UChicago students on Sept. 27 at 6:30 p.m. in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. During this celebrated UChicago tradition, she will talk about wonder and how it helps us to understand the world and ourselves.
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In his 40-plus-year career at the University of Chicago, Edward Wasiolek became a renowned scholar of Slavic and comparative literature, and particularly of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Wasiolek edited five volumes devoted to the notebooks for Dostoevsky’s novels, translated and edited volumes on Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, and wrote the widely acclaimed Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (1964). He also wrote Tolstoy’s Major Fiction (1978) and gave a distinguished presentation on Tolstoy to the United Nations in 1988.
Wasiolek, who passed away on May 3 at age 92, taught from 1955 to 1996 at UChicago, where he was the Avalon Foundation Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, and the College. He also served as the chair of the Comparative Literature Program and of the Department Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Award-winning UChicago composer Augusta Read Thomas is championing the inaugural session of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition. She sees the opening season for these concerts as the start that advances beyond the UChicago campus. For example, one of Center’s featured musicians in the the Grossman Ensemble “could be ambassadors for the university and the city and the composers, and themselves,” says Thomas, University Professor of Composition in the Music Department of the Division of the Humanities.
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