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  • Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

    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 month’s novel is Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer.

    A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties.

    The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

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

  • Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven

    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 month’s novel is NATIONAL BESTSELLER Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.

    An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. Now an original series on HBO Max.

    Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

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

  • Ian McEwan’s Atonement

    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 month’s novel is Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

    This month’s novel is NATIONAL BESTSELLER Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

    A symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness that provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from the acclaimed Booker Prize–winning, international bestselling author Ian McEwan.

    On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. But Briony’ s incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings about a crime that will change all their lives.

    “A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama.” —John Updike, The New Yorker

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

  • John Irving’s The Cider House Rules

    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 month’s novel is John Irving’s The Cider House Rules.

    “The Cider House Rules is filled with people to love and to feel for. . . . The characters in John Irving’s novel break all the rules, and yet they remain noble and free-spirited.”—The Houston Post

    First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is set in rural Maine in the first half of the twentieth century. The novel tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch—saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud’s, ether addict and abortionist. This is also the story of Dr. Larch’s favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.

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

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer

    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 month’s novel is Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer.

    #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK 

    From the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates comes a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom.

    This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.

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

  • Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,

    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 month’s novel is Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

    The beloved classic that turned Carson McCullers into an overnight literary sensation and one of the Modern Library’s top 20 novels of the 20th century. In a Georgia Mill town during the 1930s, an enigmatic John Singer, draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a doctor, a widowed café owner, and a young girl. Each yearns for escape from small town life, but the young girl, Mick Kelly, the book’s heroine (loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music.

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


  • Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

    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 month’s novel is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

    Awe and exhilaration–along with heartbreak and mordant wit–abound in Lolita, Nabokov’s most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love–love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

    “The only convincing love story of our century.” —Vanity Fair

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


     

  • Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier

    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 month’s novel is Ford Madox Ford’ The Good Soldier.

    One of the most important works of twentieth-century British literature, The Good Soldier addresses the lives and interrelationships between two couples: one American, one British. A tragicomic novel of manners, in which John Dowell narrates the disintegration of both his own and another marriage, the work’s depiction of passion and intrigue offers an ironic reading of Edwardian-era values.

    “One of the finest novels of our century.” –Graham Greene

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


  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

    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 month’s novel is Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

    Freedom, by the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Franzen, is a masterly novel of contemporary love and marriage, a brilliant charting of the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, and the heavy weight of empire.

    Patty and Walter Berglund were the pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant garde of the Whole Foods generation. But now, in the new millennium, they have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter, once an environmental lawyer, taken a job working with Big Coal? Most startling of all, why has Patty, the perfect neighbor, turned into the local Fury? Patty and Walter Berglund are indelible characters, and their mistakes and joys, as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, have become touchstones of contemporary American reality.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 


    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet

    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 month’s novel is Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?

    Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week. Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright: a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 
 

    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available.