• Virtual Tuesday Night Book Club – American Dirt

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack and Michael Thomas, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt. A #1 New York Times Bestseller and an Oprah’s Book Club Pick, American Dirt is already being hailed as “a Grapes of Wrath for our times” and “a new American classic.” Lydia Quixano Pérez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca ride la bestia—trains that make their way north toward the United States. Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to? Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt is a rare exploration into the inner hearts of people willing to sacrifice everything for a glimmer of hope.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

     

  • Virtual Tuesday Night Book Club: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack and Michael Thomas, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. At once a scathing satire, an ominous warning, and a tour de force of narrative suspense, The Handmaid’s Tale is a modern classic.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. Get more information on how to use zoom

  • Virtual Tuesday Night Book Club: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack and Michael Thomas, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is James Baldwin’s GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN. Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is James Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

    Free and open to the public, but registration is required. You will be provided the Zoom link when you register. 

  • Virtual Tuesday Night Book Club: Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack and Michael Thomas, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion! Our next book will be Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides.

    First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters–beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys–commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. CLICK HERE for more information on how to use zoom. Free and open to the public, but registration is required.

  • Virtual Tuesday Night Book Club: Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack and Michael Thomas, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Joan Didion’s PLAY IT AS IT LAYS. A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil—literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul—it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. CLICK HERE for more information on how to use zoom

  • VIRTUAL Tuesday Night Book Club: Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack and Michael Thomas, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    Our first selection is Colm Toibin’s celebrated Brooklyn (2009). In the novel, Eilis Lacey comes of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America, she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind. Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, who loves the Dodgers and his big Italian family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. CLICK HERE for more information on how to use zoom

  • Taije Silverman

    Taije Silverman is the author of Houses Are Fields, a book of poems published in 2009 by Louisiana University Press. Her Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli (translated from the Italian with Marina Della Putta Johnston) will be published by Princeton University Press in fall 2019. Recent poems and translations have been in The Best American Poetry 2017 and  The Best American Poetry 2016, Harvard Review, The Nation, Agni, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her poems are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Five Points, and The Georgia Review. She is the recipient of a 2017 Pushcart Prize, the 2016 Anne Halley Prize for best poem in The Massachusetts Review, a 2011 Fulbright Award, the 2010-11 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College, and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Houses Are Fields appeared in Italian translation in 2013 (Le Case Sono Campi, trans. Giorgia Pordenoni, Oedipus Edizioni). Silverman previously taught at the University of Bologna, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and at Emory University, where she was the Creative Writing Fellow.

  • Alexandra Kleeman

    Alexandra Kleeman is a Staten Island-based writer of fiction and nonfiction, and the winner of the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among others. Nonfiction essays and reportage have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Her work has received scholarships and grants from Bread Loaf, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and ArtFarm Nebraska. She is the author of the debut novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine (Harper, 2015) and Intimations (Harper, 2016), a short story collection

  • POSTPONED – Jordy Rosenberg

    Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

    Jordy Rosenberg is the author of Confessions of the Fox – described by The New York Times as “a mind-bending romp through a gender-fluid, 18th-century London,” named a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection, finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Publishing Triangle Award. Confessions has been recognized by The New Yorker, the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Kirkus Reviews, LitHub, Electric Literature and the Feminist Press as one of the Best Books of 2018.

    Jordy is a professor of 18th-Century Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Critical Theory at The University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

  • Katie Ford

    Location: Wilson Hall

    Katie Ford is the author of Deposition, Colosseum, and the forthcoming Blood Lyrics (Graywolf Press, 2014). Ford is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals. She teaches at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Josh Emmons, and their young daughter.