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  • Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

    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 The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis.

    Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works included the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.  The Guardian writes that “all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a ‘terrible compulsive vividness in his style… that constant demonstrating of his command of English’; and it’s true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop.” Amis’s raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called “the new unpleasantness.”

    Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul—it showed you who you really were.
    The wizard couldn’t look at it without turning away. The king couldn’t look at it. The courtiers couldn’t look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could.

    The Zone of Interest is a love story with a violently unromantic setting. Can love survive the mirror? Can we even meet each other’s eye, after we have seen who we really are? Powered by both wit and compassion, and in characteristically vivid prose, Martin Amis’s unforgettable new novel excavates the depths and contradictions of the human soul.

  • Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

    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 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.

    Sir Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British-American novelist known for blending magic realism with historical fiction, often exploring East-West cultural themes. His acclaimed novel Midnight’s Children (1981) won the Booker Prize and was twice named the best of all Booker winners. His 1988 novel The Satanic Verses led to global controversy, a fatwa calling for his death, and multiple violent attacks, including a 2022 stabbing in New York.

    Rushdie has received numerous honors, including a knighthood in 2007 and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has lived in the U.S. since 2000 and taught at NYU and Emory. His 2012 memoir Joseph Anton recounts life under threat. In 2023, Time named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

    Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,” all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.

    This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight’ s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.

  • Hernan Diaz, Trust

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Hernan Diaz’s Trust.

    WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION
    A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

    Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

    Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.

    Wide Sargasso Sea, a masterpiece of modern fiction, was Jean Rhys’s return to the literary center stage. She had a startling early career and was known for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into light one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This mesmerizing work introduces us to Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Louisa May Alcott, Little Women.

    Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

    It is no surprise that Little Women, the adored classic of four devoted sisters, was loosely based on Louisa May Alcott’s own life. In fact, Alcott drew from her own personality to create a heroine unlike any seen before: Jo, willful, headstrong, and undoubtedly the backbone of the March family. Follow the sisters from innocent adolescence to sage adulthood, with all the joy and sorrow of life in between, and fall in love with them and this endearing story. Praised by Madeleine Stern as “a book on the American home, and hence universal in its appeal,” Little Women has been an avidly read tale for generations.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • The 1619 Project

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is The 1619 Project.

    A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New American Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.

    The New York Times Magazine‘s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Harold Pinter, Betrayal

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Harold Pinter, Betrayal.

    “One of the most essential artists produced by the twentieth century. Pinter’s work gets under our skin more than that of any living playwright.” —New York Times

    Upon its premiere at the National Theatre, Betrayal was immediately recognized as a masterpiece. It won the Olivier Award for best new play, and has since been performed all around the world and made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley, and Patricia Hodge. Betrayal begins with a meeting between adulterous lovers, Emma and Jerry, two years after their affair has ended. During the nine scenes of the play, we move back in time through the stages of their affair, ending in the house of Emma and her husband Robert, Jerry’s best friend.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Percival Everett, James

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Percival Everett’s James.

    AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR FOR 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman.

    Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude.

    One of the most influential literary works of our time, One Hundred Years of Solitude remains a dazzling and original achievement by the masterful Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendiá family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad and alive with unforgettable men and women—brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul—this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.