Writing in the City: Why New York Makes Great Writers

SINY 114 - Writing in the City: Why New York Makes Great Writers

This is both a fiction workshop and an introduction to the literary culture of New York.  Students will engage in a rigorous study of the craft of fiction, one that focuses upon writers who have a connection to the city.  We will begin by anatomizing published stories by New York writers like John Cheever, Grace Paley, Nathan Englander, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, Ralph Ellison, and Philip Roth.  Students will be encouraged to seek out and experience the settings of the stories; place-based writing exercises will tune students’ senses to the rhythms of New York.  Students will then produce their own short stories, which we will examine in candid and respectful workshop discussions.

The course will also provide an entrée into the New York literary scene.  Writers like Zadie Smith, Nathan Englander, and Colson Whitehead will be invited to the class to discuss their work and the city’s influence upon it; students will be encouraged to attend literary events like the Moth Storytelling Series, Amanda Stern’s famous Happy Ending Reading Series, and the literary lectures at the 92nd St. Y.  Students will visit the city’s independent bookstores—icons like the Strand and St. Mark’s Bookshop, but also secret gems like Michael Seidenberg’s tiny Upper East Side shop, Brazen Head.  Students will pay a visit to the New York Public Library to learn how writers use its incomparable collection for research.  A panel of experts from the publishing industry—magazine and book editors, publishers, and literary agents—will visit the class to discuss the essential relationship between writers and those who bring their work to print.  

This course fulfills the Creative Expression (CE) WAYS requirement.

Meet the Instructor(s)

Julie Orringer

Julie Orringer is the author of three award-winning books: How to Breathe Underwater, The Invisible Bridge, and The Flight Portfolio, which was the basis for the 2023 Top Ten Netflix series Transatlantic. A graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop and Stanford University's Stegner Fellowship program, she is the winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, the Northern California Book Award, and the Jewish Library Association Award, among others; she has been longlisted for the Orange Prize, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and MacDowell. Her books have been New York Times bestsellers and Notable Books, have been chosen as required reading for all Stanford students, and have been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches at New York University and Stanford, and lives with her husband and children in Brooklyn, where she is at work on a novel set in Iowa and Ireland.