Moving towards the Magic Mountain by the Lighthouse; visiting Alice Munro along the way…

Upcoming Salons–Register now to get the opening notes and start reading…

• November 10th: One Day Intensive To the Lighthouse 5:30- 10 PM

• Starting November 12th-13th The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann weekly study (afternoon or evening meetings: Tuesdays 12:30-2:30, Wednesdays 8-10 PM)

• November 10th: One Day Intensive To the Lighthouse 5:30- 10 PM (same study as 10.11, different date to accommodate schedules)

•  December 16th Alice Munro short stories (one meeting) 7:30-10 PM

Having survived the Wide Sargasso Sea, we are going to climb Mann’s Magic Mountain and go to The Lighthouse– visiting the peculiar and gorgeous realm of Alice Munro along the way…of course, some of us are still embroiled in the Sound and the Fury….

There is room for another intensive study in the coming months: if you have a request, please contact us….

Coming Studies  for more information about each of the following, please visit the Events page

Alice Munro Short Stories One night study November 4th 7:30-10 PM
Munro’s award of the Nobel Prize for literature is the perfect excuse to offer a study based on two of her short stories. We will look closely at “Runaway” and “Boys and Girls” in this single meeting and consider her unique voice in probing the intimacy and peculiarities of the human heart. That’s Alice Munro in the picture below– reminding us of the need for laughter in the midst of our contemplations.

Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Starting week of November 12th
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain has been grouped with the two other giant Modernist classics Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past as the formative novels of the Modernist era. A first dip in to the text reveals an accessible, lilting narrative that once in, you find yourself considering time, society, passion, memory from the strange angle of remove that characterises the perspective of the invalid. Mann’s work is also deeply political; placed before WWI but written between WWI and WWII, MM engages questions of Nationalism and nostalgia with the shadow of future events shifting the weight of the ironic stance that Mann employs.

We will need some time to encounter the richness and length of this work: the study will extend over three five-week sessions ( a total of 15 weeks). Meetings start the first week of November; we will break for the holidays.
Day time meetings: 12:30-2:30 Tuesday afternoons    four spaces remaining
Evening meetings: 8-10 PM Wednesday evenings        five spaces remaining

Recommended Edition Everyman’s Library (2005) translation by John E. Woods (available at Owl Bookshop Kentish Town)

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf One Day Salon Intensive London
In this exquisite work, Woolf seeks to break through the restraints of language to access the interior voice of passions, fears, unspeakable thoughts and human dynamics. By employing stream of consciousness narrative and the early stirrings of the modernist aesthetic, Woolf gives insights into the nature of relationships and the formation of self in relation to others that will be recognizable – and revealing to each reader.
Choice of two dates–each a one day intensive: November 10th or November 29th