Literary Seminars

 
Especially good for the summer

• The Summer Book, Tove Jansson

• Circe, Madeline Miller

• A Month in the Country, J. L. Carr

• A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle

• Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan

• A Room with a View, E. M. Forster

• I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith

• The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, George Saunders

• The Prime of Miss Jean Brody, Muriel Spark

“Classic” novels

• Beloved, Toni Morrison

• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

• Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

• Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

• Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

• Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton

• 4:50 from Paddington, Agatha Christie

• The Color Purple, Alice Walker

• King Lear, William Shakespeare

• Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger

• Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald

• What Maisie Knew, Henry James

• Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez

• Strong Poison, Dorothy L. Sayers

• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

• Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

• Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf

• Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov

• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

• The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey

• Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

• Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion

• A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion

“Contemporary” novels

• Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, Lorrie Moore

• Less, Andrew Sean Greer

• Chemistry, Weike Wang

• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson

• Fleishman Is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner

• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

• Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders

• Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward

• Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli

• Boy, Snow, Bird, Helen Oyeyemi

• A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley

• The Testament of Mary, Colm Tóibín

• 10:04, Ben Lerner

• Winter’s Bone, Daniel Woodrell

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz

• The Sellout, Paul Beatty

• Mariette in Ecstasy, Ron Hansen

• Deadwood, Pete Dexter

Short story collections

• Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Grace Paley

• Nine Stories, J. D. Salinger

• Bark, Lorrie Moore

• Varieties of Disturbance, Lydia Davis

• A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin

• A Fairly Good Time, Mavis Gallant

Nonfiction

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion

• The Beautiful Struggle, Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Jenny Lawson

• Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, David Sedaris