Literary Seminars - Materials

Pre-class materials for 2023 Literary Seminars

Cassandra at the Wedding, Dorothy Baker

The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford

Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve Babitz

Frankissstein, Jeanette Winterson

Archive of books covered in 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