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Robert Coover, author of Noir and over twenty other acclaimed works of fiction, will be at the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) Conference in Washington this week. AWP holds its Annual Conference & Bookfair in a different region of North America in order to celebrate the outstanding authors, teachers, writing programs, literary centers, and small press publishers of that region. The Annual Conference typically features 350 presentations: readings, lectures, panel discussions, and Forums plus hundreds of book signings, receptions, dances, and informal gatherings. The conference will host a tribute to Robert Coover this year, and the full schedule is now available.

Robert Coover has received many prizes for his many novels and short story collections, including the Faulkner Award, the Rhea Lifetime Achievement Award, and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. At Brown University, he teaches Cave Writing (a writing workshop in immersive virtual reality), and directs the International Writers Project, a freedom-to-write program. Last year, The Overlook Press published its first book by this distinguished author: Noir, a true page-turner - wry, absurd, and desolate - which finds this American master at the top of his form.

Have you picked up a copy of Deyan Sudjic's new biography of architect Norman Foster? If not, this article from Sunday's New York Times should definitely pique your interest in the book. While NORMAN FOSTER: A LIFE IN ARCHITECTURE is primarily a professional biography, it also discusses Foster's idealism, design aesthetic and the Masdar development that received so much attention from the Times. Go here to read the full article, and check out a brief excerpt below!

Back in 2007, when the government here announced its plan for “the world’s first zero-carbon city” on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, many Westerners dismissed it as a gimmick — a faddish follow-up to neighboring Dubai’s half-mile-high tower in the desert and archipelago of man-made islands in the shape of palm trees.

Designed by Foster & Partners, a firm known for feats of technological wizardry, the city, called Masdar, would be a perfect square, nearly a mile on each side, raised on a 23-foot-high base to capture desert breezes. Beneath its labyrinth of pedestrian streets, a fleet of driverless electric cars would navigate silently through dimly lit tunnels. The project conjured both a walled medieval fortress and an upgraded version of the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland.

Well, those early assessments turned out to be wrong. By this past week, as people began moving into the first section of the project to be completed — a 3 ½-acre zone surrounding a sustainability-oriented research institute — it was clear that Masdar is something more daring and more noxious.

Norman Foster, the firm’s principal partner, has blended high-tech design and ancient construction practices into an intriguing model for a sustainable community, in a country whose oil money allows it to build almost anything, even as pressure grows to prepare for the day the wells run dry. And he has worked in an alluring social vision, in which local tradition and the drive toward modernization are no longer in conflict — a vision that, at first glance, seems to brim with hope.