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.
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 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
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
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
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
“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 room and people will hear me even before I open my mouth to be speaking. I want to live in this life and help many
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;
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
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
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, 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
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
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 planted in 2022, what can a book such as this provide as we reflect on our own pandemic experiences and try to make sense of
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
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
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 readers step outside of their comfort zone and view things from the perspective of the absurd. In doing that, Keret brings a fresh, comical, and
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
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, and philosophy of the modern world. After an eclipse of his reputation for some decades, Bergson's ideas have returned as one of the most powerful
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
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 reign of the despotic Sultan Abdülhamid II. The stage of the epidemic is the fictional island Minger in the Levant, and the year is
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,
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
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
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
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
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,
“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
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
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.
“A list of furniture is not a good beginning to a letter, though I dare say a clever person with a fantastic turn of mind could transform even a laundry list into a poem.” Mildred Lathbury, the “excellent woman” at the heart of Barbara Pym’s 1952 comedy of manners, is full of such opinions and
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
Thoreau’s Journal is one of the greatest piece of American nature-writing and one of the greatest intellectual achievements in world literature. As Virginia Woolf said, in the Journal "we have a chance of getting to know Thoreau as few people are known." Thoreau considered his journals his central literary endeavor. They are, among other things,
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
Blending the novel and the short story format, Tower satirically examines modern life through six interconnected stories that all take place in a 674-story skyscraper. Bae Myung-hoon is one of the most famous sci-fi writers in Korea, and this is the first of his novels to be translated into English. I’m Waiting for You has
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
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
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 within less than five years of each other, these novels all occur in the same science fiction universe that is most often referred to as
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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