The Institute for Global Understanding (IGU) and the Center for the Arts at Monmouth University invite you to the second Pearson’s World Cinema Series (PWCS) movie and discussion event of the fall semester on Thursday, October 23rd, at 6:05 PM in the Young Auditorium, Bey Hall. We will screen the movie Leviathan (2014) directed by Andrei Zviagintsev. The movie will be hosted by Dr. Jason Adolf with Prof. Tom Pearson. Screening will be followed by a discussion and refreshments.
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Leviathan
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Creative Writing (Advanced)
Class Schedule: February 12, 17, and 19 | 7:30 – 9:00 PM
Creative Writing: Character Development (Advanced)
Whether you are embarking on your memoir or crafting your first work of fiction, the task of the writer is to develop compelling characters that connect with readers. Taking the “me out of memoir” allows you to develop your parents and loved ones as characters. In this three part course, we will utilize description, dialogue, and action to create characters that resonate with readers of any genre. No experience necessary, just a willingness to create characters to jump off the page!
Zoom Link will be provided upon registration.
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Creative Writing (Introduction)
Class Schedule: September 25, 30, and October 7 | 7:30 – 9:00 PM
Introduction to Creative Writing: Character Development: Whether you are embarking on your memoir or crafting your first work of fiction, the task of the writer is to develop compelling characters that connect with readers. Taking the “me out of memoir” allows you to develop your parents and loved ones as characters. In this three part course, we will utilize description, dialogue, and action to create characters that resonate with readers of any genre. No experience necessary, just a willingness to create characters to jump off the page!
Zoom Link will be provided upon registration.
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John Irving, The World According to Garp
Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion! This weeks book is The World According to Gary by John Irving
New York Times bestseller — 20th anniversary edition with a new afterword from the author — “A wonderful novel, full of energy and art, at once funny and horrifying and heartbreaking.”- The Washington Post
This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields–a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes–even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with “lunacy and sorrow”; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries– with more than ten million copies in print–this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”Praise for The World According to Garp
“John Irving, it is abundantly clear, is a true artist.” – Los Angeles Times
“A brilliant panoply of current attitudes toward sex, marriage and parenthood, the feminist movement and – above all – the concept of delineated sexual roles… Irving’s characters will stay alive for years to come.” – Chicago Tribune
“A social tragi-comedy of such velocity that it reads rather like a domestic sequel to Catch-22.” – The Observer (London)
“A large talent announces itself on practically every page.” – The Book-of-the-Month Club News
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Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion! This week’s book is Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
Hilary Mantel was the bestselling author of many novels including Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Bring Up the Bodies, Book Two of the Wolf Hall Trilogy, was also awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award. She also wrote A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, An Experiment in Love, The Giant, O’Brien, Fludd, Beyond Black, Every Day Is Mother’s Day, Vacant Possession, and a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Mantel was the winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books.
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
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Andrew Martin -Visiting Writer
The Visiting Writers Series will welcome Andrew Martin, who will be reading from his latest novel, which will be released in 2026.
He is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable book, the story collection Cool for America, and the forthcoming novel Down Time. His work appears regularly in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, and his stories and essays have also been published recently in The Atlantic, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Montana’s MFA program, he teaches in the Writer’s Foundry MFA at St. Joseph’s University and in the Mountainview MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University
Please RSVP to Michele McBride mmcbride@monmouth.edu to be put on the attendee list.
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Akhil Sharma – Visiting Writer
Sharma is a highly decorated short-story writer and novelist; he’s been awarded many of the most prestigious prizes and recognitions that a fiction writer can receive. His first novel, An Obedient Father (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), hailed in New York Magazine by Jonathan Franzen as “A great novel” and described by Hilary Mantel in the New York Review of Books as “uncompromising,” with a “first chapter . . . [that] blasts off the locks and splinters the wood,” received the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Sharma’s second novel, the spectacular Family Life (Norton, 2014), received both the International Dublin Literary Award and the Folio Prize. Scholar and writer Edmund White called it “a terse, devastating account of growing up as a brilliant outsider in American culture” and described it as “a near perfect novel.”
Sharma’s third and most recent book, the story collection A Life of Adventure and Delight (Norton, 2017), prompted writer Yiyun Li to describe Sharma as “truly the Chekhov of our time.” His stories have been widely published and anthologized, appearing in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Award Stories.
Indeed, Sharma is such an exacting and rigorous writer that, quite unusually, he recently published a revised and rewritten edition of An Obedient Father (McNally Editions, 2022) more than twenty years after it first appeared in print. The critic Wyatt Mason, reviewing the revised version in The New York Times Magazine, described this as “Something white-rhino rare in the history of literature”, adding, approvingly, “there is scarcely a paragraph that hasn’t been improved . . . ”
Born in Delhi, India, Sharma grew up in Edison, NJ. Before becoming a professor at Duke, where he now teaches, he was on the faculty at Rutgers. He is an engaging and surprising speaker and an excellent reader of his work
This event is sponsored by The Visiting Writers Series, with the Center for the Arts and the Intercultural Center.
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Poetry Readings with Q&A Featuring Alicia Ostriker & Joan Larkin
ALICIA OSTRIKER has published 19 collections of poetry, been twice nominated for the National Book Award, and has twice received the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, among other honors. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry , The Atlantic , Prairie Schooner, and other journals, and has been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic. Her most recent collections of poems are Waiting for the Light and The Volcano and After:Selected and New Poems 2002 – 2019 . She was New York State Poet Laureate for 2018 – 2021 and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2015 – 2020.
JOAN LARKIN is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Blue Hanuman (2014); My Body: New and Selected Poems (2007), which received the Audre Lorde Award from the Publishing Triangle; Lambda Literary Award winner Cold River (1997); and Housework (1975). With Jaime Manrique, Larkin translated Sor Juana’ s Love Poems, a bilingual edition of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz’ s poetry (1997). Her prose works include I f You Want What We Have: Sponsorship Meditations (1998) and Glad Day: Daily Meditations for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender People (1998). Her plays include The AIDS Passion, The Living, and Wiretap.
This event is being held in conjunction with A Tribute to Jean Valentine – Panel Discussion on October 29 at 2:50 in the Julian Abele Room.
Hosted By Department of English (Brother Austen Poets-in-the-Classroom Series) in partnership with the Visiting Writers Series. Also cosponsored by PGIS (Program in Gender and Intersectionality Studies)
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Hernan Diaz
Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of two novels translated into thirty-four languages. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.”
His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 Best Novels of the Decade.
Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. It was listed as a best book of the year by over thirty publications and named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year. One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022, Trust is currently being developed as a limited series for HBO.
Hernan Diaz’s stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.
Diaz holds a PhD from NYU, edits an academic journal at Columbia University, and is also the author of Borges, between History and Eternity.