LitSalon Shorts booking now:

Nancy Goldstein is offering this LitSalon Short as a “taster” for anyone considering joining her for the full Keats’ Odes: Beauty and Truth study, starting on Thursday 4 June. We’ll be discussing Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) first, then considering Wallace Stevens’ adjacent Anecdote of the Jar (1918).

Keats wrote Ode on a Grecian Urn in May of 1819, alongside three of the other six odes for which he is best known: Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy and Ode to Indolence. In the previous month he began his sequence with Ode to Psyche; he ended it in September with To Autumn. In October of that year he turned 24. Seventeen months later he died in Rome, of tuberculosis, at the age of 25.

It is one of the most concentrated periods of lyric achievement in English literary history, and Ode on a Grecian Urn, alongside Ode to a Nightingale, is considered one of the exemplars of the English lyric tradition. 

Small wonder then that Wallace Stevens asks, in his poem written while visiting Elizabethton, Tennessee, what it means to follow in Keats’ wake — and in the wake of the entire British literary tradition. Remember: Stevens is a secular 20th-century poet from the new world power that emerges after the First World War. Previously, the United States had been largely peripheral to European great-power politics, and the country and its people were still considered boorish at best and lacking any real aesthetic tradition.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single session LitSalon Short ahead of the Keats’ Odes: Beauty and Truth study led by Dr Nancy Goldstein, starting in June.
• Wednesday, 29 April, 6.30-8.30 pm (UK), live on Zoom
• ‘LitSalon Shorts’ are single-session studies in which a facilitator shares with the wider Salon community their enthusiasm for an aspect of literature or culture.
• ‘Shorts’ are offered free-of-charge, but numbers are limited so please use the booking form below to reserve a place. 
• Although there is no fee for this study, Nancy asks you to consider making a donation – perhaps the price of your last G&T or flat white? – to José Andres’ World Central Kitchen, which feeds hungry people in war and emergency zones all over the world, from Gaza, Lebanon and Israel, to Iran, Pakistan and areas struggling with natural disasters.

Ahead of his forthcoming study of A Pale View of Hills, join Lewis Ward for a discussion of Ishiguro’s intriguing and complex relationship to the country of his birth. We will read an early short story, analyse sections of his Nobel Prize speech, and consider the influence of classic postwar Japanese cinema on his imagination and writing.

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954, and moved to England aged five. He grew up as a typical Surrey schoolboy, singing in the choir and commuting on the suburban train. He took British citizenship in his twenties, and only returned to Japan for brief visits later in life. Yet in his Nobel speech of 2017 the author spoke extensively about his relationship to the country of his birth, and how his Japanese ‘side’ played a crucial role in his becoming a writer.

In his speech, Ishiguro described how, studying for an MA in creative writing, he suddenly took inspiration from what he calls his inner ‘personal Japan’, not a ‘real place’ but ‘an emotional construct put together by a child out of memory, imagination and speculation’. With hindsight, he sees this as ‘an act of preservation’ in the face of his dwindling connections to Japan, a way of getting ‘his’ Japan down on paper forever.

This impulse led to his first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, both set largely in the post-war Japan he had left. We will read these novels in future LitSalon studies, starting with Pale View (beginning in the week after this session, at the same time).

But first, and as a kind of preparation for those who wish to join the group reading A Pale View of Hills, we will read what may be seen as a ‘prototype’, an out-of-print short story set in Nagasaki, A Strange and Sometimes Sadness. This gives some clues to the nature of Ishiguro’s ‘personal Japan’. We will also explore the important influence of classic post-war Japanese cinema (such as Ozu’s Tokyo Story) on Ishiguro’s imagination, and consider his own later adaptation of Kurosawa’s Ikiru as Living.  Finally, we will closely read sections of Ishiguro’s Nobel speech and examine it in relation not only to Japan but also the important themes of hindsight, self-fashioning, self-deception and memory that have formed the bedrock of his art.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single meeting LitSalon Short, led by Lewis Ward live on Zoom
• Wednesday 13 May, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)
• Free of charge, but please book your place using the form below.

As the first epic Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf holds a unique place in the history of English literature. Set in the warrior societies of dark age Denmark and Sweden, it tells of the hero Beowulf and his three victorious fights with the monstrous creature Grendel, with Grendel’s ferocious, vengeful mother, and with a venomous, fire-breathing, treasure-hoarding dragon.

Every translation of a work of literature is a new interpretation of the original and there have been many versions down the centuries. In this LitSalon Short, Tim Swinglehurst will discuss some of the more recent traditional translations of Beowulf and compare them to the acclaimed 2021 ‘feminist’ version translated by celebrated author and editor Maria Dahvana Headley, which focuses on themes of toxic masculinity, power dynamics and warrior-bonding while, in the words of Professor Carolyne Larrington, allowing “space for the poem’s women to stretch and breathe”. 

Tim will also explain why he has chosen this translation, described by The New Yorker as “a Beowulf for our moment” as the focus for a four-week study of Beowulf he will lead from 2-23 July 2026 (full details can be found here).

JOINING DETAILS:

• A one and a quarter hour LitSalon Short led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom
• LitSalon Shorts are offered free of charge but places must be pre-booked using the form below.

Since its first appearance in print in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has enchanted generations of children with the tale of a little girl who follows a white rabbit down a rabbit hole, to discover a bizarre and fantastical world occupied by equally outlandish and unsettling characters such as the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and the formidable Queen of Hearts.

In this LitSalon Short we will consider why the book (and its sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass) have such enduring appeal to both adults and children. How many interpretations are possible and what were the intentions of its author Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Dodgson, the Oxford mathematics don? What do we bring to the book as readers, often remembering it from our childhood experience of the text and illustrations portraying a strange and sometimes surreal alternative reality?

For anyone wanting to dig deeper, Tim will be leading a four meeting study of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland starting in August.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single meeting LitSalon Short, live on Zoom, led by Tim Swinglehurst
• Thursday 25 June, 6.00-7.15 pm (UK time)
• Free of charge (but please book your place using the form below)