Hampshire College

Author Evan Fallenberg spoke at Hampshire College on November 11 at 5:30 p.m. in the East Lecture Hall of Franklin Patterson Hall. His talk was titled Pigeons, Punks, Pansies and Pervs: Literary Heroes in Contemporary Israeli Literature. The public was invited and admission was free.

With its exciting mix of eclectic stories and characters that are unique, troubled, searching, sexy, and dynamic, Israeli literature is flourishing at home and abroad. The audience for this lecture by a U.S.-born Israeli writer and translator met a few of those characters, learned what they have to say about Israeli society, and watched as they underwent a transformation to meet an international audience.

Fallenberg is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, and a graduate of Georgetown University and the MFA program in creative writing at Vermont College. He has lived in Israel since 1985, where he writes, translates and teaches. His first novel, Light Fell (Soho Press, 2008), won the American Library Association's Barbara Gittings Stonewall Book Award for Literature and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award in fiction and a Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction.

Fallenberg's recent translations include Ron Leshem's Beaufort, Batya Gur's Murder in Jerusalem, Alon Hilu's Death of a Monk and The House of Dajani, and Meir Shalev's A Pigeon and a Boy, winner of the 2007 National Jewish Book Award for fiction and a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Fallenberg is an instructor in the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University.