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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.

  • John Vercher

    John’s debut novel, Three-Fifths, was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Chicago Tribune. In the U.K., Three-Fifths was named a Book of the Year by The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, and The Guardian. His second novel, After the Lights Go Out, was published by Soho Press. It’s been called “simply brilliant” by Publishers Weekly in a starred review, “shrewd and explosive” by The New York Times, and was named an Editors’ Choice in Adult Fiction for 2022 by Booklist. His third novel, Devil Is Fine has received starred reviews from Booklist and BookPage, was named a Best New Book of the Summer by TIME Magazine and The Root, an Indie Next pick for July, and one of the Top Ten Books to Add to Your Reading List in June by the Los Angeles Times. Additionally, Devil is Fine was a June book pick by The Center for Fiction, one of the 12 Must-Read Books of June by The Chicago Review of Books, a Book of the Day for July by NPR, and was featured on NPR’s It’s Been A Minute.

  • 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) 

  • 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.