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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.

     

  • Virtual Tuesday Night Book Club: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

    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 Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. At once a scathing satire, an ominous warning, and a tour de force of narrative suspense, The Handmaid’s Tale is a modern classic.

    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: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain

    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 James Baldwin’s GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN. Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is James Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

    Free and open to the public, but registration is required. You will be provided the Zoom link when you register. 

  • Virtual Tuesday Night Book Club: Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides

    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! Our next book will be Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides.

    First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters–beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys–commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. CLICK HERE for more information on how to use zoom. Free and open to the public, but registration is required.

  • Virtual Tuesday Night Book Club: Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays

    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 Joan Didion’s PLAY IT AS IT LAYS. A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil—literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul—it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. CLICK HERE for more information on how to use zoom