LIT CLASS
PAUL RUDNICK, MARK DOTY & NICK BURD
“The world can treat you bad and you get hurt, but being from New Jersey, you learn to get over it,” says Rudnick (left) in one of his typical bons mots. The multiplatform talent—New Yorker essays, plays (Jeffrey), movies (In & Out), novels (I’ll Take It)—has just published his first collection of essays, I Shudder: and Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey. Highlights include his hilarious visit to a convent to research Sister Act and a piece on his lifelong junk food diet—which may be the secret of his slender appearance at 51.
Doty’s risky, searing, and ultimately redemptive poems have earned him a devoted following—and a heap of awards. The first American poet to win the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, in 1995, Doty (center) has published eight books of verse—including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2008 National Book Award—and three memoirs, most recently Dog Years, which chronicles the death of his partner from AIDS and the aftermath of 9/11. In September, Doty joined the faculty at Rutgers University.
When Burd’s coming-of-age (and coming-out) novel The Vast Fields of Ordinary debuted in May it proved anything but typical—The New York Times hailed it as “fascinating and dreamy” and “the best kind of first novel.” An alum of the University of Iowa, the New School, and the indie rock band Burn Disco Burn, 29-year-old Burd (right) is a program manager at the literary/human rights organization PEN American Center and is now at work on a new novel he calls “a noirish tale about a gay grifter in Recession-era New York City.”
