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.
In this seminar we will read Robinson’s third, fourth, and fifth novels, Home, Lila, and Jack. These novels complete the quartet that begins with Gilead. Home takes up the story
There are Great American Novels and then there is Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece. Have you read it years ago and forgotten it already? Have you thought you should read
If you already know Tove Jansson as the author and illustrator of the Moominfamily stories and comic strips, you will meet her in this Delve seminar as the author of
The vignetted format of this text sometimes expands into short stories and sometimes shrinks into prose-poems, but regardless of any section’s length, this book is always intimate, charming, and transportive. Galeano uses journalistic research, autobiographical anecdotes, and interviews to emphasize how there really is no distinction between the personal and the political. He writes of
Explore James Baldwin's first two novels - Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room - and some of his early essays in order to deepen your understanding of the intersection of identity, morality, and power. What do these early works teach about Baldwin's response to his own question: what does it mean to
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
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
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
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
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
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
“My mama say education will give me a voice. I want more than just a voice, Ms. Tia. I want a louding voice,” I say. “I want to enter a
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
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
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
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man with "the mind on fire," wrote some of the most important and greatest essays in American literature prior to the later twentieth century. Emerson's thought combined some of the most important trends in religion, culture, and philosophy from the start of modernity with the intense intellectual and moral culture of
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,
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
Author Emily St. John Mandel told The LA Times in March 2020, “I would not recommend reading Station Eleven in the middle of a pandemic.” Now as we are firmly
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
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
Etgar Keret is one of the most important Israeli authors alive today. He has mastered the genre of short fiction with a witticism that uses humor and farce to make
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
In 1889 Henri Bergson's (1858-1941) bestseller Time and Free Will inaugurated a vast revolution of the understanding of time in world philosophy that was a keystone in the literature, art,
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
In this seminar we will explore Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, Nights of Plague, an epic narrative which depicts the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the late Ottoman era during
The Argentine genius Jorge Luis Borges explored every facet of the word during his lifetime of writing. From sonnets about dream tigers to stories about detectives in Buenos Aires to
Vanity Fair (“A Novel without a Hero”), by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848), belongs on the same shelf with other towering novels of the Victorian age: Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, and The Way We Live Now. Its protagonist, Becky Sharp, is one of the most tantalizing, bewitching, infuriating, charming, scheming, and amoral characters in all
Novels of ghosts and haunted landscapes can open the door to discussions of sociology and repression, trauma, and the cathartic function of horror. In this seminar, we will examine themes of possession, repression, haunting, and the mad woman in the attic in three Victorian and American horror novels from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries:
The Symposium by Plato asks: what is love? It is the story of a banquet in classical Athens, attended by Socrates and his friends, at which each person tells a story about the origin of Love. These stories are full of deep psychological insight, powerful mythic imagination, and profound philosophical reflection that have made The
The American novelist Walker Percy described The Brothers Karamazov as “maybe the greatest novel of all time . . . . almost prophesies and prefigures everything—all the bloody mess and the issues of the 20th century.” It’s fair to extend Percy’s observation to include the mess of the present century as well. The Brothers K
Though published many decades apart, these two texts share similarities both in their subject matter and their experimental qualities. Just as Dictee cannot be merely labeled as a memoir and DMZ Colony cannot be labeled purely as a poetry collection, both texts expand our understanding of genre by weaving together prose, poetry and photographs. Moreover,
What is a border? Who does it serve? Who gets to draw it? This seminar will interrogate our understanding of the border as a static entity by witnessing its creation, listening to those who have documented its development and studying how ever-changing policies continue to influence the lives of those on all sides of the
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