“There is no human experience that cannot be described in literature.”

Inside a Eugene Lang College classroom, students prepare to brave the world outside, armed with stories.

In Reading for Writers: The Contemporary Short Story, “students will read and engage with the work of some of the best living practitioners of the short story and bring five of them into the classroom for in depth conversations on their writing, their methods, their influences, their intentions, and their lives as writers.” So begins the syllabus for a dream course taught by Eric Simonoff, acclaimed literary agent and new professor in the Literary Studies department at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. Simonoff represents writers of incredible caliber, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Lethem, Philipp Meyer, Stacy Schiff, Edward P. Jones, Nam Le, and Chris Adrian, among others. Although he is characteristic of faculty at The New School, shaping his classroom and his field of work simultaneously, he is not a typical undergraduate writing instructor. In granting his students access to brilliant, contemporary writers — Phil Klay, Daniel Alarcón, Maryse Meijer, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and ZZ Packer in the Fall 2018 semester — he is demystifying perhaps the most frightening aspect of writing: how to get someone (like Simonoff) to read your work.”

Read the full article on Medium.