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Literary Conversations Past Readings
2023
- Albert Camus, The Plague
- Julian Barnes, The Man In The Red Coat
- Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop
- L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
2021–2022
- Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle
- W.G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn
- Natalia Ginzburg, Family Lexicon
- Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
- Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts
- Ivo Andric, Bridge on the Drina
- James Baldwin, Another Country
- Elizabeth Bowen, The Hotel
- V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
- Magda Szabo, Abigail
- Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed
- Natalia Ginzburg, The Manzoni Family
- Edmund De Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes
- George Saunders, A Swim In A Pond In The Rain
- Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry And Other Stories
- Stefan Zweig, The Royal Game
- Albert Camus, The Plague
- Julian Barnes, The Man In The Red Coat
- Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop
- L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
- Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master And Margarita
- Shirley Hazzard, The Transit Of Venus
2020–2021
- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
- Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses From An Old Manse
- T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
- John Marquand, H. M. Pulham, Esq.
- Leo Damrosch, The Club
- Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
- Theodore Fontane, Effi Briest
- James Boswell, Life of Johnson
2019–2020
- Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
- Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education (Robert Baldick’s 1964 translation for Penguin Classics recommended)
- Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
- Honoré de Balzac, Scenes From A Courtesan’s Life
- Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences
- Homer, The Odyssey (Emily Wilson translation)
- Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters
- Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
- Ivan Turgenev, The Torrents of Spring
2018–2019
- John Dos Passos, The Big Money
- William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault
- Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
- Isak Dinesen, Winter’s Tales
- Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
- Lawrence Durrell, Justine
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler
- Winston Churchill, My Early Life
- Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
- Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve
- Charlotte Bronte, Villette
- Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness
2017–2018
- Pär Lagerkvist, The Dwarf (translation by Alexandra Dick)
- Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
- St. Augustine, Confessions
- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
- J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
- Anton Chekhov, The Steppe
- John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel
- Nadine Gordimer, A Guest of Honor
- Sybelle Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio
- Stefan Zweig, The World Of Yesterday (translation by Anthea Bell (Pushkin Press))
- John Dos Passos, 1919
- John Dos Passos, The Big Money
2016–2017
- Joseph Roth, The Radetsky March
- Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name
- Edith Wharton, A Motor Flight Through France
- Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
- Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington
- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
- Henry James, The Bostonians
- Rudyard Kipling, Kim
- Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
- Franz Kafka, The Trial
- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
- Jane Gardam, Old Filth
2015–2016
- George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
- trans. Seamus Heaney, Beowulf
- Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
- E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
- Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
- Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel
- Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma
- Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister
- Joseph Roth, The Radetsky March
2014–2015
- Madame de Lafayette, The Princesse de Cleves
- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Honore de Balzac, Human Comedy: Selected Stories
- Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure
- Emile Zola, Germinal
- Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography
- James Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain
- Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters
- Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge
- Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
2013–2014
- Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled
- George Santayana, The Last Puritan
- Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables
- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
- Anonymous, The Song of Roland
- Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
- Graham Greene, The Comedians
2012–2013
- Leo Tolstoy, War & Peace
- Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris
- Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths
- Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation
- John Banville, The Infinities
- Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot
- Mario Vargas Llosa, Conversation in the Cathedral
- Barry Unsworth, Morality Play
- Naguib Mahfouz, Before the Throne
- Anthony Trollope, The Warden
2011–2012
- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
- Aeschylus, The Oresteia
- Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
- Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
- Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year
- Alexandre Dumas, The Lady of the Camellias
- Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses
- Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
- Waguih Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club
- C. P. Snow, The Masters
2010–2011
- Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
- Jonah Lehrer, Proust was a Neuroscientist
- Jane Austen, Persuasion
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
- Shusako Endo, Deep River
- Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night
- Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
- Anton Chekhov, Short Stories of Anton Chekov
- John LeCarre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
- Vergil, Aeneid
2009–2010
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
- Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
- Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
- Robert Graves, Good Bye To All That
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
- William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
- Virginia Woolf, Orlando
- Marguerite Yourcenar, The Memoirs of Hadrian
- Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh
2008–2009
- Charles Dickins, Bleak House
- Ha Jin, Waiting
- James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts; Day of the Locust
- Julion Cortazar, Hopscotch
- Nadine Gordimer, The Burger’s Daughter
- George Meredith, The Egoist
- Kazuo Ishiguru, An Artist of the Floating World
- Henry James, The Golden Bowl
- Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing
- Anthony Powell, A Buyer’s Market
- Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World
2007–2008
- Stendhal, The Red and the Black
- Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
- Aristophanes, The Birds
- Henry James, What Maisie Knew
- William Trevor, Two Lives
- Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter
- Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
- Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
- Goethe, Faust
- Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata; How Much Land Does a Man Need; The Death of Ivan Illych
2006–2007
- Jose Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon
- Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
- G. di Lampedusa, The Leopard
- Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
- Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Orhan Pamuk, Snow
- Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
- Eric Auerback, Mimesis
- Homer, The Iliad
2005–2006
- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
- Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore
- Franz Kafka, The Trial
- Pat Barker, Regeneration
- Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamozov
- Nikos Kanantakis, Zorba the Greek
- Soren Kirekegaard, Fear and Trembling
- Julian Barnes, History of the World in 10 1/2 Days
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
- Dante Alighieri, The Inferno
2003–2005
- George Eliot, Middlemarch
- D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
- Zadie Smith, White Teeth
- Laurence Sterne, The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy
- Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life
- Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
- Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
2002–2003
- Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
- Andre Malraux, Man’s Fate
- Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King
- E.M. Forster, Howard’s End; Aspects of the Novel
- Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters
- Charles Dickens, Hard Times
- Thomas Mann, Dr. Faustus
- Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way; The Budding Grove
- Sophocles,Antigone
- Jean Anouilh, Antigone
- Book of Job (Hebrew Bible)
- Archibald MacLeish, J.B.
- Seamus Heaney, Beowolf
- John Gardner, Grendel
- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
- James Gould Cozzens, Castaway
2000–2002
- Maria & Jennifer Gillan, eds., Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry
- Athol Fugard, My Children! My Africa!
- Michael Chabon, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
- Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
- Keri Hulme, The Bone People
- Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War
- Albert Camus, The Stranger
- V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
- Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country
- Alan Lightman, The Diagnosis
- Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel
- Richard Wright, Native Son
- William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice
- Niall Ferguson, House of Rothschild
- Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country
- Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
1999–2000
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
- Book of Jeremiah (Hebrew Bible)
- Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree
- William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
- William Blake, Songs of Innocense and Experience
- Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter
- Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman
- Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge
1998–1999
- William Shakespeare, King Lear
- Jane Austen, Persuasion
- Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales
- Henry James, Washington Square
- James Carroll, American Requiem
- Molly Keane, Time After Time
- Andrei Makine, Dreams of My Russian Summer
- Oe Kenzaburo, A Personal Matter
- Anton Checkhov, The Cherry Orchard
1997–1998
- Homer, The Odyssey
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road
- Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- William Faulkner, Light in August
- Elizabeth Griffith, In her Own Right: Life of E.C. Stanton
- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
- J.M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K
- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
- James Joyce, Ulysses
- Octavio Paz, The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism
- Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves
- Nigel Nicholson, Portrait of a Marriage
- Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra; Othello
- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
1995–1997
- Arthur Miller, The Crucible
- Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
- Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex; Oedipus at Colonnus; Antigone
- Pablo Neruda, Love: Ten Poems
- Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography
- Bernard Malamud, The Fixer
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day
- Tinberg, The Nightingale’s Song
- Shakespeare, Richard II
- Whitman, Yeats, Seaney & Brooke, Poems
- Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth