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  • Virtual Tuesday Night Book Club: Raymond Carver’s What We Talk about When We Talk about Love

    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 book is Raymond Carver’s What We Talk about When We Talk about Love. In his second collection, including the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.

    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: Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow

    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 Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow and joining the conversation will be the special guest host Anika Chapin. A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

    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: Clare Beams’ The Illness Lesson

    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 Clare Beams’ The Illness Lesson.  Written in intensely vivid prose and brimming with psychological insight, The Illness Lesson is a powerful exploration of women’s bodies, women’s minds, and the time-honored tradition of doubting both.

    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: Madeline Miller’s Circe

    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 Madeline Miller’s Circe and book club will be guest hosted by Rupa DasGupta, artist and former Monmouth Adjunct Professor. With unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and page-turning suspense, Circe is a triumph of storytelling, an intoxicating epic of family rivalry, palace intrigue, love and loss, as well as a celebration of indomitable female strength in a man’s world.

    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: Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox

    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 Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox.  Set in the eighteenth-century London underworld Confessions of the Fox is a bawdy, genre-bending novel that reimagines the life of thief and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard to tell a profound story about gender, love, and liberation. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • HuffPost • Kirkus Reviews • Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award • Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize • “A dazzling tale of queer romance and resistance.”—Time

    The author, Jordy Rosenberg will be joining the conversation for this event!!

    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 – 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.

     

  • Cancelled: Lives of the ‘Brows’: Autobiography, Taste, Ethics

    Photo of Dr. Max Cavitch, Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
    Dr. Max Cavitch, Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

    Please join us for a guest lecture by Dr. Max Cavitch, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also an affiliated faculty member of the programs in Cinema Studies, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and Psychoanalytic Studies.

    Dr. Cavitch will be discussing literary taste and value in relation to autobiography—one of the world’s most popular and widely practiced genres. From “highbrow” triumphs of artistic intention to “middlebrow” narratives of historical significance to “lowbrow” tell-alls of gossipy celebrity, there are autobiographies to suit every taste. But what is “taste,” anyway? What does it have to do with “literary value”? And, moreover, what do either taste or literary value have to do with the question of whose lives and life-stories matter?

    Refreshments will be served. Students, faculty, and interested members of the public are warmly invited to attend.

    Free and open to the public.
    Sponsored by the Wayne D. McMurray Endowed Chair in the Humanities, Dr. Kristin Bluemel

  • Robyn Crawford’s A Song For You: My Life with Whitney Houston – Book Signing

    Join us for a book signing with the author, Robyn Crawford, former member of the women’s basketball team

    About A Song For You

    Book Cover for A Song For You, by Robyn Crawford

    After decades of silence, Robyn Crawford, close friend, collaborator, and confidante of Whitney Houston, shares her story.

    Whitney Houston is as big a superstar as the music business has ever known. She exploded on the scene in 1985 with her debut album and spent the next two decades dominating the charts and capturing the hearts of fans around the world. One person was there by her side through it all—her best friend, Robyn Crawford.

    Since Whitney’s death in 2012, Robyn has stayed out of the limelight and held the great joys, wild adventures, and hard truths of her life with Whitney close to her heart. Now, for the first time ever, Crawford opens up in her new memoir, A Song for You.

    With warmth, candor, and an impressive recall of detail, Robyn describes the two meeting as teenagers in the 1980s, and how their lives and friendship evolved as Whitney recorded her first album and Robyn pursued her promising Division I basketball career. Together during countless sold-out world tours, behind the scenes as hit after hit was recorded, through Whitney’s marriage and the birth of her daughter, the two navigated often challenging families, great loves, and painful losses, always supporting each other with laughter and friendship.

    Deeply personal and heartfelt, A Song for You is the vital, honest, and previously untold story that provides an understanding of the complex life of Whitney Houston. Finally, the person who knew her best sets the record straight.

    About Robyn Crawford

    After a long career in the music industry, Robyn Crawford is now focused on mental and physical wellness and writing. She lives in New Jersey with her wife and children.

  • Just Beachy: A Reading of Sandy Stories

    Help us mark the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Sandy. Readers will present stories that have been posted to “9 Feet High,” part of the Just Beachy/After Sandy installation now on view in Rechnitz Hall’s DiMattio Gallery.

    We invite you to participate by reading your own story, or listen as you hear your own story being read. Join us as your Sandy experience is acknowledged through the spoken word. Your story deserves to be heard!

  • George Eliot, Judaism, and Mary Anne Evans, Bicentennial

    In this lecture, eminent Eliot scholar and internationally renowned literary critic William Baker takes audiences on a multimedia celebration of Jewish author George Eliot’s life and times. Of special note will be the 200th anniversary of her epic novel Middlemarch.

    About the speaker:
    William Baker is Emeritus Professor of English and University Libraries at Northern Illinois University. He has authored more than 30 books, including numerous studies of George Eliot and nineteenth-century British literature.