Benjamin Taylor
Benjamin Taylor is the author of a book of essays, Into the Open, and two novels, Tales Out of School, winner of the Harold Ribalow Prize, and The Book of Getting Even, a 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award Finalist, a 2008 Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year, and a Ferro-Grumley Prize Finalist. In October 2009, The Book of Getting Even appeared as El Libro de la Venganza in Spain, where it was named a best book of the year by El Pais. In November 2010, Viking Press released Saul Bellow: Letters, edited by Taylor. Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, a travel memoir from Marian Wood Books, is scheduled for 2012. Taylor is a graduate of Haverford College and Columbia University where he earned the doctorate in English and comparative literature. He has contributed to magazines including Bookforum, BOMB, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New Leader, The Georgia Review, Raritan, and others. A longtime member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty at The New School, he has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College and the Graduate Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia.
“There are choices you make not by planning but (as you make your shadow) by being where you are”
“On a certain afternoon of July, at the tawniest hour, on Galvez Island, the earth -- the tilting spinning earth -- was unearthly. There is no accounting for this adequacy, this splendor that overtakes you. You lack neither flour nor oil while the famine lasts. On a certain afternoon, at a certain hour, the earth is earth no longer, but a fragment of eternity. And you, greenhorn jest of time, are a fragment of eternity too.”