New York Times bestselling author Jerry Craft returns with a companion book to New Kid, winner of the 2020 Newbery Medal, the Coretta Scott King Author Award, and the Kirkus Prize. This time, it’s Jordan’s friend Drew who takes centre stage in another laugh-out-loud funny, powerful, and important story about being one of the few kids of colour in a prestigious private school.

Eighth grader Drew Ellis is no stranger to the saying “You have to work twice as hard to be just as good.” His grandmother has reminded him his entire life. But what if he works ten times as hard and still isn’t afforded the same opportunities that his privileged classmates at the Riverdale Academy Day School take for granted?

To make matters worse, Drew begins to feel as if his good friend Liam might be one of those privileged kids. He wants to pretend like everything is fine, but it’s hard not to withdraw, and even their mutual friend Jordan doesn’t know how to keep the group together.

As the pressures mount, will Drew find a way to bridge the divide so he and his friends can truly accept each other? And most important, will he finally be able to accept himself?

SALON DETAILS 

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

In Middlemarch, Eliot probes the complexity of human nature and studies the idea of vocation: the call to find meaning through work in a provincial world.

I love the dilemma–how is an intelligent woman going to be intellectually stimulated in a time when there are so few options for women? This reflects Eliot’s own story: why does she write under a male pseudonym? Dorothea settles on marriage to an older man, a scholar and (she hopes) a mentor–ironically making an intellectual choice about the desire of the heart. What ensues is her struggle to be the person she aspires to being a world which values none of the ideals that interest her.

I love how psychological Eliot is, how interested she is in the inner workings of people’s minds. Why do Dorothea and Lydgate make the choices they do? Why do they choose people so unsuited to them? As in Daniel Deronda, Eliot is very interested in intellectual/spiritual passion–how religious scholarship can inform or transform a life–but while she is attracted to the dispassionate discipline of religious wisdom, she also knows that earthly love is what sustains us. This tension, between moral ideal and human behaviour, is the drive of the novel and probably makes the most sense in its historical context: a time of great intellectual inquiry, the Victorian obsession with self-improvement. Yet it isn’t that different from the self-improvement obsessions of our own time…

This study was added in response to the interest in the previous study of Middlemarch – as well as the requests for something to focus the mind during lockdown and its aftermath.

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Sarah Snoxall
• Tuesday early evening  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm   
• Seven-meeting study, 20 April 2021 through 7 May 2021 
• Online discussions using Zoom meeting interface. Zoom is free for participants, instructions will be sent upon registration.
• Recommended edition: Middlemarch by George Eliot (Norton Critical Editions) Paperback – 26 Jan. 2000 ISBN-10 : 9780393974522
• £170 for seven-week study, includes notes and questions for preparation.
  

UPDATE: AS of March 8- one space remaining!

TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £170 (Please contact us if you prefer to pay by direct bank transfer).

“The implications surrounding our responsibility to live, and live sensuously, are at the heart of The Ambassadors.”
Colm Toibin, Guardian, ‘ A book that changed me’

The countryside near Paris painted by Emile Lambinet

‘Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted.’

These are the opening words of The Ambassadors, the first of Henry James’ final trio of completed novels. Written when James was in his early sixites, it is often thought to be his most autobiographical book. The central character, Lambert Strether, a 55 year old American, experiences a serious life crisis when he is sent on a mission to the dangerously seductive European city of Paris. Faced with the dawning realisation that he may have missed out on some of the most important things in human life, he is forced to consider a seemingly endless cascade of questions. His bewilderment is portrayed via a detailed exploration of his inner world, combined with a series of vivid, humorous scenes in which he encounters a variety of characters, both American and local. The basic plot of a rather naïve (for his age) American in an alluring but ultimately corrupt metropolitan European context will be familiar to readers of Henry James, as will the fact that it is the women who are the strong characters directing the course of events.

Responses to the book over the years have been many and various. Henry James himself wrote: ‘I am able to estimate this as, frankly, quite the best, “all round”… of all my productions’. Professor Sarah Churchwell (who also wrote the introduction for the Everyman edition) was a fierce advocate when she chose it for BBC Radio 4’s ‘A Good Read’ (click here, discussion starts 10 minutes in). The consensus of modern opinion is that James’ final novels represent his finest achievement. Why not join us to find out what you think?

“For the uninitiated, and even for those who are familiar with the famous author, encountering the late novels of Henry James can be both exasperating and exhilarating. For Keith Fosbrook, this is all part of the pleasure of accompanying fellow readers on the adventure . . . I have read three of James’s novels with Keith in the last six months and I am looking forward to reading another one later this year.”
                                                                                                                                                                       LLS participant, Barry Fernald

Salon Details and Registration

• Facilitated by Keith Fosbrook
• Seven meeting study from 21 April to 9 June, Wednesday evenings 5.00pm to 7.00 pm
• Recommended Edition: Norton Critical Second Edition (1994); ISBN 0 393 96314-4
• £170 for seven meeting study includes background materials and opening notes.
• To register for the study, please use the secure Paypal button below to pay £170. Please ensure that the email that is connected to your Paypal account is the same email that you use for correspondence.

Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration. If you have any questions about this study or payment please contact us.

Rope Bridges

Your land of love consists mainly of rope bridges
criss-crossing the sky like a cat’s cradle, strung
between mountains, for each time you’ve moved on,
‘gotten over’ something, a rope bridge hangs
as testament, the last remaining thread of thought . . .

Caroline Bird

Since Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced the Petrarchan sonnet to the English Court in the early 16th century, poets have been using this deceptively simple 14-line form to express their thoughts on love, mortality, politics and just about everything else. Adapted by Shakespeare to accommodate the challenges of rhyming in English, and used by a succession of poets from Milton to Frost, the sonnet is very much alive and well in the 21st century – in recent years two poets have received T.S. Eliot Prize nominations for collections comprised entirely of sonnets.

This two-part study considers the enduring appeal of the sonnet through the study of form, metre and voice. Sonnets written in the 1600s or in 2000s will be looked at in detail to help us understand how poets (including Caroline Bird, quoted above) have found expression for their ideas through fitting them into a tightly woven square of rhymed iambic pentameter. Throughout the course we will read these ‘little songs’ aloud and dig deeper into their meaning as we hear their music.

Salon Details:

Facilitated by: Caroline Hammond and Jane Wymark

Tuesday Evenings: 6–8.00pm

Two-meeting study: 27 April & 4 May 2021

Recommended Books: TBC

£50 for two meeting study includes background materials and opening notes

To register,  please use the PayPal button below to pay £50.  

Upon receipt of payment, you will be sent the opening notes, resources and preparation suggestions. If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

Long Ago and Far Away is an ongoing, weekly virtual Salon group that began in January 2020 as an eight-week study of the Myths and Legends of Troy. Since then, the group have continued together and met weekly through a year of lockdown, going on to read:

• over twenty Classical Greek dramas by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides
• some of the oldest extant Greek myths in Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, and the Homeric Hymns
• Ovid’s Roman retelling of myths from Greece in the Metamorphoses
• foundation myths of Mesopotamia and the Epic of Gilgamesh
• most recently, the biblical Book of Genesis

Now well into their second year, the dedicated and energetic readers in the Long Ago group will next turn north for an extended study of stories from the Norse tradition. First up: beginning 28 April, 2021 is a first sequence on the Sagas of Icelanders.

Long Ago and Far Away meets in six-week segments, with a flexible reading plan that follows the interest of the group. Following the first six-week round of Icelandic Sagas, the group will likely continue with more of the sagas, and then delve further into Norse myth and legend in the Prose and Poetic Eddas, the Song of the Nibelung, and the Saga of the Volsungs.

If you are interested in joining the Long Ago and Far Away group on continuing basis, please email facilitator Mark Cwik for more information.

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Mark Cwik
• Ongoing weekly study, email facilitator Mark Cwik for details if you are interested in joining.
  
• Wednesday 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm.
  
• New topic starting 28 April, 2021: Literature of the Norse
  
• Online discussions using Zoom meeting interface. Zoom is free for participants, instructions will be sent upon registration.
• Book edition:
  • The Sagas of Icelanders, introduction by Robert Kellogg, with preface by Jane Smiley
    (Penguin Classics, 2001)
    ISBN-13: 978-0141000039

About the Icelandic Sagas:

As grandly epic as Homer, rich in tragedy as Sophocles, compellingly human as Shakespeare, and psychologically keen as Chekhov—the sagas of Icelanders are the crowning achievement of medieval Scandinavian narrative and rank among the world’s greatest literary treasures. They describe a world of a millennium ago that nevertheless rings familiar with perennial human struggles.

The forty-plus narratives of adventure and conflict that comprise the sagas are set in Iceland’s 9th- and 10th-century Age of Settlement, when a handful of families fled the oppressive kingship of Norway to set up new lives on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. It was in Iceland the era of a unique commonwealth of free chieftains with no king, clerical hierarchy, or armies, ruled by Viking traditions of honour and blood vengeance. Written down anonymously several hundred years later, the sagas look back on a pioneer generation struggling to forge and maintain a self-governing community in a harsh environment at the edge of the known world.

With economy of style and astute insight into character, the sagas portray poets, warriors, statesmen, farmers, and outlaws—strong and determined men and women who strive for power, wealth, fame, respect, and love in a frontier society that wavers between the rule of law and vengeance.
In this study we will first look closely at two of the short sagas, to become familiar with the unique literary style and the cultural background of these great tales. We’ll then lauch into the grand, multi-generational Laxdaela Saga, followed by one of the gems of the saga tradition: the story of the wily, Odyssean poet-warrior hero of Egil’s Saga.

Aeneas departs from Dido and Carthage (Aeneid, Book IV)

“My song is of war and a man: a refugee by fate,
the first from Troy to Italy’s Lavinian shores,
battered much on land and sea by blows from gods
obliging brutal Juno’s unforgetting rage. . . ”

More than Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid is probably the one text from classical antiquity that has had the longest continuous influence over the European literary and cultural imagination. Taking both of Homer’s great epics as his models, Vergil created a hero and a poem that are uniquely his own—and that are distinctly Roman.

Achilles and Odysseus are essentially private heroes: their struggles and conflicts are personal, internal, centred on their own desires and goals. Vergil’s Aeneas journeys through the complicated world of personal, familial, and civic responsibility. A widowed father, a devoted son, and the appointed leader of refugees from the Trojan War, Aeneas struggles with—and against—his duty to lead survivors from the fallen city of Troy to find a new home in a distant land. The Aeneid is a poem of adventure, violence, heroism, duty, and love, recounting along the way the famous tale of the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy, Aeneas’ love affair with the doomed Queen Dido of Carthage, his journey into the underworld, and ultimate arrival of Aeneas and the survivors of Troy in Italian lands.

In his poem, Vergil engages in the conscious creation of a foundation myth for what became the vast empire of Rome. He crafts a nuanced exploration of the price paid for empire in lives lost, relationships broken, blood spilled, and peoples displaced and destroyed. As Shadi Bartsch puts it in her introduction, “Rather than being simple propaganda, the Aeneid is in many ways a story about stories and how they work. It is an epic that tells the story of foundation but puts on display the fault lines at the base of its own edifice, revealing the mechanisms at work in wholesome origin-stories and justifications of imperial aggression.”

This study will be read-as-we-go, covering one to two books of the Aeneid per week. The study will take place on Zoom. Each session will last 2 1/4 hours, with a short break mid-session.

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Mark Cwik
• Nine-meeting study
• Thursday afternoons 4:00 pm – 6:15 pm.
  
• 29 April, 2021 to 24 June, 2021
  
• Online discussions using Zoom meeting interface. Zoom is free for participants, instructions will be sent upon registration.
• This study will use the new translation of the Aeneid by Shadi Bartsch. Please be sure to obtain this translation:
  • The Aeneid: A New Translation, by Vergil, translated by Shadi Bartsch
    (Profile Books, 2020)
    ISBN-13: 978-1788162678
• £200 for nine-week study, includes notes and questions for preparation.
  

TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £200. If you would prefer to pay by bank transfer, please email facilitator Mark Cwik to arrange payment.

ABOUT THE FACILITATOR: Mark Cwik has been organizing and leading discussions of great literature for over twenty years in London, Chicago and Toronto. He specializes in works from the ancient, mythic and religious world. He was trained as a discussion facilitator while at the Great Books Foundation in Chicago and has been a passionate advocate for great books education since attending St. John’s College, Santa Fe and the University of Chicago Basic Program in Liberal Education.

“I’ve been coming to Mark’s discussion groups for about 15 years . . . Mark is amazing in his ability to keep the group functioning smoothly. He asks questions that get to the heart of the piece and he keeps the group focused on those questions. You don’t feel that he’s trying to steer us to any conclusion; he’s in it with us to figure out what the author is saying. He makes everyone feel welcome and their opinions are respectfully heard. He’s always prepared and totally dedicated to advancing our understanding of the great books.” — group participant.

If you have any questions about this study, please contact facilitator Mark Cwik.