Events, Classes, and Seminars

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 years, including “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” “Master and Man,” “Father Sergius,” and “Hadji Murat.” Here we see Tolstoy at the pinnacle of his story-telling

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 like ethnographic study than a novel, Always Coming Home depicts a post-apocalyptic Northern California, except instead of showing the violence & chaos of the apocalypse,

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 light of its problematic language, as well as its treatment of its Black characters and of race in general. Percival Everett's recent novel, James, offers

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 accounting for Ames’s one life, lived essentially always in one Midwestern place, and the letter opens doors onto lives and times often more dramatic than

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.

While better known for her extraordinarily imaginative paintings, the British-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington was also a dazzling writer, conjuring stories that alchemically transform the banal and infuse the imagination

The Bostonians is Henry James’s most explicitly American novel—and not only because the characters spend their time arguing about politics and gender. Set in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, the book explores loyalty and love, fanaticism and friendship, family feuds and Boston marriages.

In Western literature, scholars often reduce supernatural fiction to pulp, pop, or entertaining"fluff," which is somehow less noteworthy than other works of literature. Yet horror fiction often uses supernatural tropes of haunting and monstrosity to depict oppression, marginalized identities, gender, and "madness."
Through conversation and writing, we can consider how these modern and postmodern feminist authors expand Western literature and the gothic tradition through provocative first-person narratives.

Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel 2666 attempts to explore the totality of evil in the 20th century. Ranging from World War II to Detroit to the deserts of Mexico, the nearly 1000-page book presents a huge cast of characters, each individual offering their pain and hope as exemplifications of the human condition.

Readers generally considered The Plague, published in 1947 (and a large factor in Camus receiving the Nobel Prize for literature a decade later), to be a superior metaphorical novel about

Stephen Crane lived a short and intense life, and wrote short and intense fiction. Regardless of the genre—he was a muckraking journalist, an author, and a poet—Crane never shied from an ugly truth, never spared his readers’ feelings. Whether depicting the sordid streets of lower Manhattan or fictionalizing his own experience of shipwreck, Crane’s remarkable

This four week Delve will focus on two early novels from Barbara Kingsolver. Both of these books take place in a southwest dealing with environmental impacts, poverty, and the choices people make within those contexts.

In this Delve seminar we will explore three extraordinary literary lightning bolts that Woolf produced during the later years of her life, from the 1930’s through to the first years of World War II and the Battle of Britian.

In this seminar, you will acquaint yourselves with major writings of W. G. Sebald (1944-2001).

Thomas Pynchon’s novels are chaotic combinations of ideas, puns, characters, subplots, facts, fictions, and words. Set in the eighteenth century, Mason & Dixon includes all of the above plus a talking dog.

By turns deeply personal and elusively impersonal, lyrically intense yet permeated with allusions and references, The Waste Land has inspired, puzzled and even enraged generations of readers, even as the title itself became permanently established in the popular imagination.

David Foster Wallace was uniquely prophetic in his ability to diagnose the ills of America and where they were headed in the early 2000s. Toxic masculinity, mental illness, authenticity, empathy, and dopamine exhaustion though media are constants in his work and are best showcased through his short fiction and nonfiction.

The three novels in this seminar all overlap in time and space with the mid-twentieth-century world of Gilead, while offering whole other stories and lives that offer perspectives on the great themes of race and racism, faith and family, punishment and reconciliation, love and loss and forgiveness. Set in the American past, Robinson’s novels nevertheless offer challenging insights and hope for today—hope for art, for the nation, for each other and individual selves.

Read Willima Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, both of which consider the many scars, healed and not, caused by enslavement and the Civil War. Thinking about history, memory, and what Morrison calls “rememory,” we’ll consider what it means to live in a nation, to inherit its past, and to fight for a better future.

Wallace Stevens is one of the most distinctive and extravagant voices in American poetry, an orator of the imagination and eloquent observer of the world's beauty. Beginning with the appearance of the astonishing Harmonium in 1923, Stevens published seven volumes of poetry while living an 'ordinary' life as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut. His Collected Poems is a book of wonders, one of the landmarks of American literary modernism, and his poems are admired and studied for their lustrous language, their philosophical profundity, and their commitment to the importance of poetry in our everyday lives.

One of the most compelling figures of modern thought, Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a brilliant, often startling, and visionary thinker. She was a philosopher (one of first two women in France to earn a PhD, along with her classmate Simone de Beauvoir), teacher, writer, factory worker, pacifist, soldier, marxist, anarchist, Jewish, Christian, mystic, exile, playwright, translator, and mathematician.

Edith Wharton documented the Gilded Age with an unsurpassed clarity. Born into one prominent family and marrying into another, she knew better than most what it meant to be numbered among the elite—and she drew on this knowledge in her writing, both fiction and nonfiction alike. Her account of the ethical consequences of the era’s

In this eight-week Delve, we’ll work our way through Ulysses, exploring these characters’ stories, Joyce’s prose, early twentieth-century Dublin, and the many other stories and histories woven into this extraordinary novel.

If Tolstoy’s War and Peace, written a decade earlier, was an attempt to capture the totality of political and interpersonal life, then The Brothers Karamazov is an attempt to capture the totality of internal life. We will be reading the Peaver and Volokhonsky translation, itself a major turning point in the novel’s popularity in English, shedding some of the stuffy, plodding, confusing language of earlier translations in favor a readable and populist style. The Brothers Karamazov is a big novel full of big ideas, and there is no better way to experience it than in a group.