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
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master And Margarita
Shirley Hazzard, The Transit Of Venus
Natsume Sōseki, Botchan
Multatuli, Max Havelaar
Helen Vendler, Dickinson
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Jung Chang, Wild Swans
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

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