I’m Professor Nancy Goldstein, the latest facilitator to join the Salon team, starting with a study I’ve called Education and its Discontents: the 21st-Century Bildungsroman, running from 9 November to 14 December (Sunday evenings, 3.30 – 5.30 pm GMT).
We will be discussing a pair of brilliant, articulate, tragic and surprisingly funny memoirs that read like thrillers: the 2006 graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by cartoonist (and McArthur Genius Award winner) Alison Bechdel, and Tara Westover’s Educated (2018). As background, the Broadway production of Fun Home won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Musical, and Educated debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list and was named one of the NYT 10 Best Books of 2018.
As a way of introducing myself to the Salon, I’m offering three bite-sized ‘taster’ studies during October for the price of a pay-what-you-want donation to José Andres’ World Central Kitchen, which feeds hungry people in war and emergency zones all over the world, from Gaza and Ukraine to Pakistan. It’s entirely up to you to decide where, or whether, or how much to give: perhaps the price of your last flat white or pint?
Joining one (or all) of these ‘tasters’ before deciding to enrol in a six-session study is easy:
- All readings for ‘tasters’ can be finished in under an hour and texts are available free online.
- Each live online session runs for just 90 minutes.
- We’ve carefully scheduled sessions on different days and times in the hope that everyone who wants to attend can find at least one that fits their schedule!
To register please click on one of the links in the session titles below so we can send you the Zoom link to join the discussion plus any additional online materials.
Taster #1: Portrait of the Artist as a Very Different Young Man – Two Selections from Ernest Hemingway’s First Short Story Collection: In Our Time (1929) – Thursday, 9 October, 6.00 -7:30 pm (UK)
It was novelist Margaret Atwood, best known for her dystopian feminist classic The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), who convinced me to give Hemingway a serious try. During an interview with Rachel Martin on National Public Radio in 2024 (you can listen here), Atwood explained:
Margaret Atwood: “There’s a Hemingway story in which a young man is having a campout with his girlfriend, and she realizes that things aren’t the same and she says, ‘What’s wrong?’ and he says, ‘It’s not fun anymore.’ So I think there are points in your life — for everybody’s life — when they think, ‘It’s not fun anymore.’ It’s a pretty crushing thing to say.”
Rachel Martin, NPR: “I guess, but like, I don’t know. Ernest Hemingway I don’t want to hold up as my romantic role model.”
Margaret Atwood: “It’s not a question of romantic role model: it’s a question of good story writer. And no matter what you may think of Hemingway’s private life, which I know too much about, In Our Time is one of the game-changing story collections of the 20th-century. He was a nightmare as a husband and romantic partner, but that’s . . . a different thing.”
So I read In Our Time, and . . . Atwood really had a point. I found the incisive younger Hemingway, with his modernist sensibility and his consciousness about whiteness, womanhood, class, sex, love, race and privilege a fascinating, welcome surprise. I think he will be to many other participants too.
Taster #2: Poets in Recovery – Monday 13 October, 2.30 – 4.00 pm (UK)
Raymond Carver, who was born into an impoverished family towards the end of the Depression (1938), is widely considered to be one of the greatest 20th-Century American short story writers. He was also one of its most notorious drunks, with multiple hospitalizations for his alcoholism, plus a doctor’s warning that he wouldn’t live past 40 if he didn’t stop. Carver finally got sober in 1977.
For this study, we will be comparing Carver’s criminally neglected poem Yesterday, Snow (from sometime in the early 80s and available only as a PDF that will be sent to all registrants) with Portrait of the Alcoholic Three Weeks Sober (2016) by Kaveh Akbar.
The young Iranian American poet’s debut novel, Martyr! – which also addresses addiction, grief and art – made waves last year as a National Book Award Finalist for Fiction and was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Taster #3: Portrait of the Artist as a Very Different Young Man – Two Selections from Ernest Hemingway’s First Short Story Collection: In Our Time (1929) – Tuesday 21 October, 1.00-2.30 pm (UK).
