| BENNINGTON, Vt., Dec. 18, 2006 - The New York Times ' top ten list of books published this year included two members of the Bennington College community, graduate writing program: faculty member Amy Hempel's collected short stories and alumnus Michael Pollan's best-selling, non-fiction narrative.
The Collected Short Stories of Amy Hempel, published by Scribner has been no stranger to high praise and critical acclaim. Readers and critics alike have hailed this book as a must read. Novelist Chuck Palahniuk gave Hempel's book to a friend with only this to offer: "If you don't love this, we have nothing in common." The New York Times had this to say:
"A quietly powerful presence in American fiction during the past two decades, Hempel has demonstrated unusual discipline in assembling her urbane, pointillistic and wickedly funny short stories. These collected stories show the true scale of Hempel's achievement. Her compact fictions…speak grandly to the longings and insecurities in all of us, and in a voice that is bracingly direct and sneakily profound."
Michael Pollan's ‘76 The Omnivores Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals published by Penguin Press (and excerpted in the Fall 2006 Bennington magazine) explores, as the title provides, meal origins. Part food detective, part historian, part economist but mostly good journalism, this non-fiction narrative has both awed and shocked readers with its precise and astute account of how our food makes it to our plates. The New York Times had this to say:
""When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety," Pollan writes in this supple and probing book. He gracefully navigates within these anxieties as he traces the origins of four meals - from a fast-food dinner to a "hunter-gatherer" feast - and makes us see, with remarkable clarity, exactly how what we eat affects both our bodies and the planet. Pollan is the perfect tour guide: his prose is incisive and alive, and pointed without being tendentious." |
