Cuomo honors Lurie
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the appointment Aug. 29 of Cornell Professor Emerita Alison Lurie as the 10th New York State Author. She will serve from 2012 to 2014. Kurt Vonnegut, Peter Matthiessen, Norman Mailer, E. L. Doctorow and Grace Paley previously held the title.
Novelist William Kennedy, executive director of the New York State Writers Institute, said: “Alison Lurie is a wise and masterful teller of tales that often center on marital strife, domestic disorder and academic absurdity – comedies of manners of our time but with a deeply human strain. She is a superior prose stylist with a wickedly satirical talent.”
Lurie is best known for her novels “The War Between the Tates” (1974) and “Foreign Affairs” (1984), which won the Pulitzer Prize.