Paul La Farge

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Not to be confused with Paul Lafargue.
Paul La Farge
BornPaul Bayard La Farge
(1970-11-17)November 17, 1970
New York City, U.S.
DiedJanuary 18, 2023(2023-01-18) (aged 52)
Poughkeepsie, New York, U.S.
Occupation
  • Novelist
  • essayist
NationalityAmerican
Alma materYale University
ParentsTom La Farge
Lucy Bergson La Farge
Richard Zimmer (stepfather)
Wendy Walker (stepmother)

Paul Bayard La Farge[1] (November 17, 1970 – January 18, 2023) was an American novelist and essayist. He wrote five novels: The Artist of the Missing (1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (2001), The Facts of Winter (2005), Luminous Airplanes (2011), and The Night Ocean (2017), all of which, particularly Haussmann, earned positive critical attention. His essays, fiction and reviews have appeared in publications such as The Believer, The Village Voice, Harper's, and The New Yorker.

Biography

A native of New York City, La Farge is the son of writer Tom La Farge and psychiatrist Lucy Bergson La Farge, and the stepson of psychiatrist Richard Zimmer and writer Wendy Walker. He graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in French. He subsequently pursued graduate studies in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He was awarded residencies at Yaddo (1999) and MacDowell (2002 and five others) and the Guggenheim Fellowship (2002) and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2012).[2] He was the winner of two California Book Awards. He was also awarded the Bard Fiction Prize (2005) [3] bestowed annually by Bard College, where he had been on the MFA faculty. From 2009 to 2010, he was a visiting professor of English at Wesleyan University.[4] He also taught creative writing in the MFA program at Columbia. He was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library from 2013 to 2014. In Spring 2015, he was a visiting faculty member at Bennington College. From 2016 to 2017, La Farge was the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany.[5] In 2019, he was awarded a residency at the American Academy in Berlin.[6] From Fall 2020 to Fall 2022 he was on the faculty at Bennington College.[7] La Farge died from cancer on January 18, 2023, in Poughkeepsie, New York.[1]

Novels

La Farge's first novel, The Artist of the Missing, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in May 1999, and illustrated with surrealist images by cubist artist Stephen Alcorn.[8] The novel takes place in an anonymous, modern-day city in which people go missing on a regular basis. Frank, the titular character, paints portraits of the missing, among whom are his parents, his brother James and, eventually, even his romantic interest, enigmatic police photographer Prudence, whose job it was to take pictures of corpses. Reviewers compared the debut work to the writings of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges and categorized him among "literary wizards" and "fantasists". The "Poissel" name extends to and, to a degree, arrogates La Farge's third book, The Facts of Winter (McSweeney's, June 2005) which, on its front cover, states, "by Paul Poissel, translated by Paul La Farge". It is also set in Paris, although the year is now 1881, a decade into the Third Republic. The reader is privy to "a series of short dreams, each dreamed by people in and around Paris, which is to say that it is a fictional account of the imaginary lives of people who may or may not be real". Again, La Farge's command of French is featured, as the dream accounts come to the reader in both French and English, and the descriptive language is hauntingly poetic. The scholarly "afterword" strives to elucidate further the work and thought of the "unjustly neglected" author of this tome, Paul Poissel. Luminous Airplanes, La Farge's third novel, is the humorous story of a young man with two mothers who learns a family secret while cleaning out his grandfather's house in upstate New York. The book was published in 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and features immersive text. It was listed as one of "the Most Criminally Overlooked Books of 2011" by Emily Temple in Flavorwire. In March 2017, La Farge published The Night Ocean, a novel about a doctor investigating the relationship between horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and R. H. Barlow. The novel, published by Penguin Press, was listed as one of "28 books to read in 2017" by Jeva Lange in The Week.[9]

Bibliography

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Genzlinger, Neil (January 25, 2023). "Paul La Farge, Inventive Novelist, Is Dead at 52". New York Times.
  2. ↑ "MacDowell Colony, Paul La Farge". MacDowell Colony.
  3. ↑ "Bard Fiction Prize, Paul La Farge". Bard College. Archived from the original on 2013-02-17.
  4. ↑ Hamilton, Aubrey (2 March 2010). "LaFarge Publishes Short Story in Harper's". The Wesleyan Argus. Archived from the original on 30 July 2010. Retrieved 5 March 2010.
  5. ↑ American Studies Leipzig (July 29, 2016). "Next Picador Professor Paul La Farge". Archived from the original on 2017-02-13. Retrieved 2017-02-12.
  6. ↑ American Academy in Berlin (July 1, 2018). "Paul La Farge American Academy". Archived from the original on 2021-12-24. Retrieved 2021-12-23.
  7. ↑ Bennington College (July 1, 2020). "Paul La Farge Bennington College". Archived from the original on 2021-12-24. Retrieved 2021-12-23.
  8. ↑ The Artist of the Missing illustrations Archived 2008-05-18 at the Wayback Machine Alcorn Gallery.
  9. ↑ "Paul La Farge: The Night Ocean". paullafarge.com. Archived from the original on 2017-03-16. Retrieved 2017-02-27.

External links

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