Events, Classes, and Seminars

Proust’s magnum opus is often considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century. It richly repays the careful attention it demands, and becomes unforgettable. First-time readers, however, may

Reviewing A.S. Byatt’s Possession in The New York Times, Jay Parini declared it “a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a

The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest, & The Dispossessed are three of the most iconic novels by the legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin. Written

Proust’s magnum opus is often considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century. It richly repays the careful attention it demands, and becomes unforgettable. First-time readers, however, may

Nathaniel Hawthorne marveled at Anthony Trollope’s talent for conveying the truth of human experience, declaring his fictional world to be “just as real as if some giant had hewn a

Published in 1990, Omeros is the masterwork of the Nobel Prize winning Saint Lucien writer  Derek Walcott, a book-length epic poem that invites comparisons with Homer while also probing the

Catherine Sloper is young—not clever, not quick, not ugly—and rich. Into her life in New York City’s fashionable Washington Square comes Morris Townsend—“the most beautiful young man in the world.”

Proust’s magnum opus is often considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century. It richly repays the careful attention it demands, and becomes unforgettable. First-time readers, however, may

The Faust Legend takes up the question of selling your soul to the devil for magical success in this world. This Delve seminar looks at the legend in three famous

Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) was maybe the greatest short story writer in English that you might not have read. In this Delve, we will read the two dozen stories she wrote

In this Delve, we will read Portuguese Nobel-laureate José Saramago’s breathtaking novel, Blindness (1995), focusing in particular on the concept of “community.” The novel posits the trope of community as

The Wild West has always been a fiction. The heroic cowboy settling the frontier is a myth. The Western novels of the mid-20th century rewrote genocide & colonialism to justify

Emily Wilson's new translation of the Iliad, building on the accomplishment of her recent translation of the Odyssey, has kindled fresh interest in Homer's perennially relevant war epic. In this

Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is the quintessential modern novel. This is the paradigmatic “show don’t tell” writer who, by sheer force of talent, sweat, style, and restraint was able to turn

Willa Cather (1873–1947) is one of the most beloved writers in the American canon and is one of those writers whose works are embraced both by a mass audience and

“The simplest answer is that a writer who gardens is sooner or later going to write a book about the subject–I take that as inevitable,” writes Eleanor Perenyi in her forward to Green Thoughts, her collection of essays on gardening. In this course, we’ll explore literature of the garden, using Olivia Laing’s book The Garden

César Aira is one of the most prolific authors of our time, having published over 100 books since 1975, his bizarre & starkly idiosyncratic work pushes through genres that sometimes collapse mid-text only to be rebuilt around another plot to end his powerful little books. Winner of numerous literary awards & finalist for the 2015

No exploration of Tolstoy is complete without a reading of his best short stories. In four sessions we will look at a few of the small masterpieces from his later

Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin is considered by some to be her magnum opus, yet somehow it remains one of her most overlooked texts. Sometimes reading more

Strange and surreal, mysterious and dream-like, when “the supernatural” is conjured in story we find ourselves lifted out of the ordinary, material world and into more spectacular realms. In this seminar we’ll read novels that embrace this otherworldliness, stretching the familiar first into the unknown, then to the far reaches of personal and collective transformation.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains one of the most widely read and studied texts in the American literary canon, as well as the subject of recent reappraisals in

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett is one of the most loveable and pleasure-giving novels in the American canon: the story of a writer who leaves her home in Boston for what she thinks will be a solitude-filled summer-long “working” vacation at Dunnet Landing, a (fictional) “Down East” Maine fishing village.

In recent years, authors have become inspired to conjure modern takes on ancient Greek myths in best-seller ready, cinematic novels as well as in more explorative, poetic forms. Many of these bring out the inherent juiciness of these perennial tales, while unveiling feminist, queer, and ecstatic undertones buried in the original texts.

This seminar offers an in-depth exploration of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924). The novel invites the reader to multiple trajectories of reading: As a modernist epic, The Magic Mountain intimates the tradition of the Bildungsroman, only with an ironic twist. It draws an unforgettable portrayal of a lost world, the cosmopolitan European society before the First World War.

In this seminar we will read Marx both for his ideas and and for the pleasures of his prose. We will observe his use of Greek myths and other legends, the inspiration he took from European fiction and poetry, his journalistic reports of life in his own day, his lively historical accounts, his vast range of allusions from literature, his critiques of the arts, and his refined expression of his sense of the tragedy and the hope in life.

Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead appears as one long and intimate letter from an aging father, the Reverend John Ames, to his young son. The letter is an

In this seminar, we will tackle Melville’s whale of a book, exploring its philosophical insights, its debts to other writers (especially Shakespeare and Hawthorne), its commentary on US politics and culture, and (of course) its cetology, the chapters about whales and whaling. Across six weeks, we will take up Melville’s challenge—“Read it if you can”—and join the Pequod’s crew on their quests for knowledge, for friendship, and for revenge.

Known for her “fearless and unbridled” writing about the natural world, Annie Dillard’s first three non-fiction books conjure lyrical insights so vivid that they seem to burn. So much more than a “nature writer,” Dillard’s observations of whatever she’s looking at—the transient effects of an eclipse viewing in a small town, a near-deadly airplane crash on an island in the Pacific Northwest, the unraveling of a tangled snake-skin she finds wandering through the woods—reveal the living textures of things: their ordinary strangeness and transcendent beauty.

Explore Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague (2022), an epic narrative which depicts the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the late Ottoman era. The stage is the fictional island Mingheria in the Levant, and the year is 1901.