Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel is We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), one of the New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Vogue, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently Features Director at Harper’s Bazaar as well as a contributing writer for The New York Times. Her second novel, Libertie, is published by Algonquin Books and out now.
-
Kaitlyn Greenidge
-
Benjamin Nugent
Benjamin Nugent is the author of Fraternity: Stories (FSG, 2020). He was awarded The Paris Review’s 2019 Terry Southern Prize for his fiction, which has been published in The Best American Short Stories and other anthologies. He’s written for Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications. He grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, and is currently Director of the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA at Southern New Hampshire University.
-
E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India
Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. A Passage to India hauntingly evokes India at the peak of the British colonial era, complete with the racial tension that underscores every aspect of daily life. Into this setting, Forster introduces Adela Quested and Mrs. Moor, British visitors to Chandrapore who, despite their strong ties to the elusive colonial community there, are eager for a more authentic taste of India. But when their fates tangle with those of Cecil Fielding and his local friend, Dr. Aziz, at the nearby Marabar Caves, the community of Chandrapore is split wide open and everyone’s life—British and Indian alike—is inexorably altered.
When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.
-
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five
Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.
When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.
-
Julia Baird’s Imagine This: Growing Up with My Brother John Lennon
Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Julia Baird’s Imagine This: Growing Up with My Brother John Lennon. The honest and revealing story of John Lennon’s childhood by his sister Julia. Poignant, raw and beautifully written, Baird casts John Lennon’s life in a new light and reveals the source of his emotional fragility and musical genius. It’s also one family’s extraordinary and powerful story of how it dealt with fame and tragedy beyond all imagining.
When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.
-
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.
-
William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice
Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. The author’s last novel, it concerns the relationships among three people sharing a boarding house in Brooklyn: Stingo, a young aspiring writer from the South, Jewish scientist Nathan Landau, and his lover Sophie, a Polish-Catholic survivor of the German Nazi concentration camps, whom Stingo befriends.
When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.
-
Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin
Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Set in 1820s Russia, Pushkin’s verse novel follows the fates of three men and three women. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it also portrays a large cast of other characters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digressions, often in a highly satirical vein.
When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.
-
J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye
Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. One of the greatest American novels of all time, The Catcher in the Rye is a classic coming-of-age story: an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.
When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.
-
Bilingual Poetry Reading and Q&A with Salgado Maranhão and Alexis Levitin
Join us for a bilingual reading (Portuguese and English) and Q&A with Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhão and translator Alexis Levitin.
Salgado Maranhão
Born in the impoverished interior of Maranhão, in northeast Brazil, Salgado Maranhão became one of the most prominent Afro-Brazilian poets. Twice winner of Prêmio Jabuti, he has been awarded major prizes from the Academy of Brazilian Letters and the Writers’ Union. Five collections of his work have appeared in English: Blood of the Sun (2012), Tiger Fur (2015), Palavora (2019), Mapping the Tribe (2020), and Consecration of the Wolves (2021), all in Alexis Levitin’s translation. In addition to seventeen books of poetry, he has written song lyrics and made recordings with some of Brazil’s leading jazz and pop musicians.
Maranhão’s poetry explores, via metaphor, the various kinds of devastation we bring upon our lands and thus upon ourselves.
Alexis Levitin
Alexis Levitin translates works from Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador. His forty-eight books of translation include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm, Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, Astrid Cabral’s Cage and Gazing Through Water, and five collections by Salgado Maranhão, including the most recent, Consecration of the Wolves. He has served as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universities of Oporto and Coimbra (Portugal), The Catholic University in Guayaquil (Ecuador), and the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil) and has held translation residencies at the Banff Center (Canada), The European Translators Collegium (Germany), and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio (Italy).
This presentation is co-sponsored by the Department of English, Monmouth Intercultural Center, Institute for Global Understanding, and Department of World Languages and Cultures