The Novel Today (Spring)

Discuss major new work by today’s top writers, including emerging novelists, award-winners, and established favorites, all of whom are central to today's cultural conversation. We will investigate a variety of inventive narrative strategies, explore the psychology of numerous fascinating characters, and examine important topics within a context of changing times, changing lives and a changing world. Together we will explore a secret agent in a rural commune of French subversives; a health resort in the Silesian mountains in which “otherness watches from the shadows”; the big impact of small decisions in Montana’s Flathead Valley; a New Yorker who believes she is secretly an alien sent to study humans; war, love, friendship and art in a strangely Irish Ancient Greece; a journalist spends two months at sea with a mysterious, shape-shifting engineer; a 42-year old woman disappears just as she was close to completing her journey hiking the entire Appalachian Trail; in the Pacific Northwest a reclusive grandfather reenters the world when his grandchildren are kidnapped; the choices and compromises of a film director in Nazi Germany; an antiquarian bookseller trapped in a time warp in a cottage in France. Readings: Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake ;  Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium;  Eric Puchner, Dream State ;  Ferdia Lennon, Glorious Exploits ; Colum McCann, Twist;   Jess Walter, So Far Gone; Amity Gaige,  Heartwood ; Daniel Kehlmann, The Director ; Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I ; Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland.  
Students should read Beautyland  for the first class

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