Author Alan Lightman '76 reads aloud from his new memoir.

Though he may not have planned for it, Victor LaValle ’94 is quickly following in the footsteps of past generations of famed Cornell authors, knocking at the doorstep of literary greats like E.B. White, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon.

When I was a freshman, I had a full-fledged mega-crush on IvyGateBlog.com. I thought it — and its editors — were the funniest and hottest shit ever. I’m talking banana phone levels of hilarious. I didn’t even know Chris Beam and Nick Summers (the founders), but I had these sort of creeper-esque fantasies about going to work for them, and becoming BFFs. And then, maybe one day we would all work at Slate together. In fact, the fame-whore in me would get excited whenever one of my articles made it onto Ragtime, even though it was rarely in a positive light.