• October 2, 2023
          He Knew He Was Right: Anthony Trollope
          October 4, 2023
          Derek Walcott: Omeros
          October 4, 2023
          One Page Wednesday- October
          October 5, 2023
          Bookmark: A fundraising gala for Literary Arts
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Events, Classes, and Seminars

Our events, classes, and seminars bring the community together to hear, learn, and discuss the most compelling issues and ideas of our day. We hope you will join us in our downtown Literary Arts space, online, and at partnering venues across Portland and Oregon.

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Tuesday

Sep 28

Delve Readers Seminars  

Hilary Mantel: Beyond the Booker

Hilary Mantel is best known for her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, the first two volumes of which (Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies) won the Booker Prize (in 2009 and 2012). The third and final volume, The Mirror and the Light, was published to acclaim in 2020. These books are modern masterpieces, yet Mantel’s earlier

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Wednesday

Oct 6

Delve Readers Seminars  

One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is one of the most celebrated & impactful books ever written. Since its publication over 50 million copies of the novel have been sold. The story follows the Buendía family & the other residents of Macondo through seven generations, depicting everything from civil war to flying carpets. The lush

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Monday

Oct 25

Delve Readers Seminars  

Herman Melville: Great Shorter Works

Although Herman Melville is best known for Moby-Dick, he also demonstrated mastery of the novella, and this Delve will explore Melville’s best-known shorter works: Bartleby the Scrivener, famous for the Wall Street denizen who “would prefer not to,” no matter what his employer might want; Benito Cereno, where a captain answering a ship’s call of

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Wednesday

Oct 27

Delve Readers Seminars  

Homer, The Odyssey

The Odyssey is one of the world's oldest and most enduring works of literature. Homer’s ancient Greek epic has inspired many modern artists and has introduced generations of readers to the the world of Greek myth, poetry, and storytelling.  In this seminar, we will explore the intricacies of Homer’s epic and its central story— Odysseus’s effort

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Sunday

Jan 16

Delve Readers Seminars  

Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms

Of the great thinkers who created modernity—Darwin, Freud, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche—Arthur Schopenhauer is the least well known in America. And yet his thoughts about the place of humankind in the universe, the nature of life, and ethics profoundly shaped many of the great writers, artists, and thinkers of the twentieth century. In the last

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Tuesday

Jan 18

Delve Readers Seminars  

Retellings

Humans are storytellers by nature: “Where would we be without our plots?” asks a character in a Margaret Atwood short story. Some stories persist over centuries and generations, subtly transformed with each retelling. In this seminar, we will read three modern renditions of old stories. In The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood reimagines the tale of Odysseus

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Wednesday

Feb 9

Monday

Apr 4

Delve Readers Seminars  

Freud to W.G. Sebald: Narratives of Trauma, Trauma of Narrative

In this seminar, we will explore Sebald’s final novel, Austerlitz (2001), and the narrative “Max Ferber” from The Emigrants (1992), as literary representations of trauma. Sebald unfolds his concept of trauma through a myriad of themes and tropes, such as, intermingled identities of survivor and victim, speaker and listener; displacement; exile; individual and collective trauma;

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Tuesday

Apr 5

Delve Readers Seminars   In-person  

Middlemarch

Virginia Woolf described George Eliot’s Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Widely considered Eliot’s masterpiece, the novel follows the interwoven lives of the inhabitants of a provincial English town. Threading together stories of love, betrayal, failed marriages, romantic idealism, and frustrated ambition, Eliot creates a microcosm of nineteenth-century life

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Wednesday

Apr 6

Delve Readers Seminars   In-person  

James Joyce’s Ulysses

February 2, 2022, marks the 100th anniversary of the publication in Paris of James Joyce's Ulysses, long considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and a uniquely challenging and rewarding book. Based in part on Joyce's lifelong interest in Homer's Odyssey, and set in Dublin, "the great Hibernian metropolis," Ulysses also represents

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Sunday

May 8

Tuesday

May 31

Delve Readers Seminars   Online  

Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and a Room of One’s Own

One of the most talented and prolific writers of her (or any) generation, Virginia Woolf published novels, short stories, plays, essays, reviews, a biography (of Roger Fry), and an impressionistic, vividly realized memoir. She is a central figure of modernism, admired for her innovative style and attention to craft. In this seminar we will read

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Wednesday

Jun 15

Delve Readers Seminars   In-person  

White Teeth

Written when she was only 25 years old, White Teeth catapulted Zadie Smith into renown as one of the most exciting authors in the English language. This profound & humorous novel revolves around two families living as neighbors in Willesden, London: the English/Jamaican Jones family & the Bangladeshi Iqbal family. The families initially become intertwined

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Wednesday

Jun 29

Wednesday

Jun 29

BIPOC only   Delve Readers Seminars   Online  

Signs. Spoken. Memory. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee

This seminar is for BIPOC participants only Celebrating the 40th anniversary of this seminal publication, we will study Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee along with some of its academic critique. This work in many ways defies categorization--with its mixture of French and English, text and images, and the poetic and political. Though it has been described

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Tuesday

Jul 5

Delve Readers Seminars   Online  

Feminist Horror and Millennial Anxiety in South Korean Literature

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung  and Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park have just been translated into English from the original Korean by Anton Hur and have recently been shortlisted and longlisted (respectively) for the Booker Prize. Though very different from one another, by reading both we can get a taste of the exciting landscape that is

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Wednesday

Aug 10

Tuesday

Aug 23

Delve Readers Seminars   Fall 2022   In-person  

“First – Poets – Then the Sun”: Emily Dickinson’s Craft, Life, and Legacy

Emily Dickinson has achieved the rarest of distinctions for a nineteenth-century poet (and a female one at that): lasting, evolving fame. Having escaped the confines of academic study and school syllabi, Dickinson has become a popular figure beloved by a wide and varied readership and the subject of films, television programs, and fan clubs. She

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Sunday

Sep 25

Monday

Oct 3

Delve for Writers   Delve Readers Seminars   Fall 2022   In-person   Writing Classes  

Delve for Writers: Joan Didion and Durga Chew-Bose

Delve for Writers is a new, occasional Delve series that offers seminars that focus on close readings of narrative, form, and stylistic choices that writers can incorporate into their own writing practice. Creative nonfiction is the perfect place to find voice, ideas and perspective – and nobody does it better Joan Didion and contemporary groundbreaker

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Tuesday

Oct 25

Tuesday

Nov 1

Tuesday

Jan 3

Sunday

Jan 15

Sunday

Jan 22

Monday

Jan 23

Monday

Jan 30

Tuesday

Mar 14

Monday

Apr 10

Delve Readers Seminars   Online   Spring 2023  

Little Things: A Study of Literary Compression

“It’s the little things that count”; “Good things come in small packages”; “Brevity is the soul of wit”; “The Devil’s in the details”… We’ll put these aphorisms to the test in this Delve Seminar exploring short poems, prose poetry, and short/micro fiction. These compressed forms aren’t lacking for content in their brevity, and we will

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Sunday

Apr 16

Delve Readers Seminars   In-person   Spring 2023  

Introduction to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past

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 find the style and size of the work daunting. This seminar is intended for participants who have always wanted to read Proust, but who would

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Tuesday

Apr 25

Delve Readers Seminars   In-person   Spring 2023  

Absalom, Absalom

Published in 1936, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! takes his favored subject--the legacy of slavery and the Civil War--and his imagined setting--Mississippi's Yoknapatawpha County--to new heights of development. Set in the period before, during, and after the Civil War, it focuses on the life of Thomas Sutpen, an aspiring plantation owner and patriarch, and his descendants.

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Wednesday

May 10

Tuesday

May 30

Delve Readers Seminars   In-person   Spring 2023  

“Beneath every history, another history”: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall

With the death of Hilary Mantel in September 2022 we lost one of the greatest writers of our time. Mantel’s books are so original, and so different from one another, that it’s often difficult to believe they were written by the same novelist. Her brilliant language, dark humor, and inventive, impeccable craft make everything she

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Tuesday

Jun 20

Sunday

Jul 30

Delve Readers Seminars   In-person   Summer 2023  

Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: Within a Budding Grove

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 find the style and size of the work daunting. This seminar is intended for participants who have always wanted to read Proust, but who would

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Thursday

Aug 10

Monday

Aug 14

Delve Readers Seminars   In-person   Summer 2023  

‘Driven toward endings’: A.S. Byatt’s Possession

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 moment, ceasing to delight.” Readers agreed. The novel was a surprise bestseller and was awarded the 1990 Booker Prize. It was subsequently adapted as a

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Wednesday

Sep 13

Delve Readers Seminars   Fall 2023   Online  

Zadie Smith: The Fraud

Zadie Smith is a critically acclaimed fiction writer, essayist, and playwright, whose work includes the novel White Teeth, winner of the Guardian First Book Prize, and On Beauty, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. This four-week Delve will focus on her new novel The Fraud, based on historical events from the 1800's. From the

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Tuesday

Sep 19

Sunday

Sep 24

Delve Readers Seminars   Fall 2023   In-person  

Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: Place Names: the Place

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 find the style and size of the work daunting. This seminar is intended for participants who have always wanted to read Proust, but who would

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