Help Select Our Next Novel

We have several proposed novels for a short study in mid-November, and we would like to ask your help choosing which to offer. Please take our quick survey to let us know what interests you. Alternatively, have a look at the proposed titles below and email us your thoughts at litsalon@gmail.com. We’ll keep the survey open until October 15. Thanks!


  • Anne Enright is an Irish novelist and short story writer whose novel The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize in 2007. This is a perceptive and psychological story of 9 siblings who come together for the funeral of their alcoholic brother who has committed suicide. No misery memoir, it is a wry exposure of complex family dynamics with a secret to be uncovered.
  • Novelist, short story writer and academic, Lorrie Moore has won several literary awards and her novel A Gate at the Stairs was shortlisted for the PEN Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize. This is a coming of age story about a young student who works as a nanny for a couple who are adopting a bi-racial child. Both comic and tragic, it is also about love and loneliness and the anxieties of the time, beautifully told.
  • Is this the perfect American novel? It has beautifully written form, content, plot, description, narrative, dialogue, characterisation and includes politics, class division, cultural observation, mystery, decadence, sex, murder, suicide, a surprise ending and last but not least, jazz.
  • Kate Chopin was a novelist and short story writer from Louisiana. The Awakening is the bold story of a wife and mother who falls in love with a younger man. Considered to be immoral and controversial at the time, it is a precursor of feminist writing, addressing emotional, psychological and sexual issues beyond the accepted gender role and mores of the time.

2017 Salon Survey Results

Toby and I want to thank everyone who filled out our survey about studies for 2017. We had a robust response, and results have been very helpful—especially your write-in comments. We’re still sifting through all the ideas, but you’ve already helped us decide on several of the studies we’re scheduling for January. We’ll have our January 2017 studies posted and open for registration in just a couple days, so keep an eye out for those!

In the survey, we asked about your interest in a dozen studies we’ve been considering. In order of popularity, the results came back like this:

Virgil’s Aeneid
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
The Five Books of Moses
Plato’s Republic
George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda
Stories and Plays of Anton Chekhov
Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
Herodotus’ Histories
Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose
Halldor Laxness’ Independent People

You’ll see much of this reflected in our 2017 schedule. In fact, the Aeneid  received so many requests that we’ll be offering it twice in the new year, once starting in January, and again starting in March.

Of even more interest to us were all the write-in suggestions you submitted. We received requests ranging from Cervantes, Tolstoy, Melville and Chaucer to Phillip Roth, Flannery O’Connor, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, Kate Tempest and Bob Dylan. Henry James was the most frequently mentioned author in the write-in votes. We also saw a number of requests for poetry studies, and for weekend studies. We won’t be able to offer studies for all of these, but they have definitely set our imaginations in motion for late spring and the rest of 2017!

Below, in no particular order, are the write-ins. Which of these catch your fancy? Let us know and add some more in the Comments section.

–Mark

LIT SALON 2017 SURVEY COMMENTS

  • Toni Morrison’s ‘Paradise‘ – even better than ‘Beloved‘ and very difficult.
  • Any Henry James, but if possible ‘The Ambassadors’
  • I also like the idea of a Henry James novel or two.
  • I’d be an enthusiast for a Middlemarch study and I see that Philip Roth was mentioned. Thomas Hardy would also interest me.
  • I would be interested in studies on Saramago, and Javier Marias.
  • So hard to choose! Following The Waste Land, would love to do some more poetry. The Romantics? Or W.B. Yeats. Elizabeth Bishop. Emily Dickinson!
  • Derek Walcott ‘Omeros’. Cervantes ‘Don Quixote’. All of your complete list above is tempting!
  • William Faulkner – Henry James – TS Eliot
  • Philip Roth or Cormac McCarthy
  • Hermann Broch: The Death of Virgil; Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities; Jose Saramago; Javier Marias; Joseph Conrad
  • Philip Roth, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O’Connor
  • Middlemarch please. Also, I have loved previous poetry salons where you have covered multiple works by the same poet rather than one huge poem (Emily Dickinson was brilliant). Would you consider Larkin, Plath, Hughes, Berryman…?
  • The work of Jeannette Winterson, Zadie Smith or Sarah Waters
  • Anthony Powell: A Dance to the Music of Time; Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled; Henry James: The Golden Bowl
  • I would be game for Wallace Stevens
  • The poetry of Matthew Arnold. Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd
  • Paradise Lost; War and Peace; King Lear
  • Moby Dick
  • Shakespeare’s plays or sonnets; Vanity Fair; Modern poets—Carol Ann Duffy, etc.
  • I would love to read Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno. Like the Proust, I never will alone. Also Tristram Shandy, I’ve failed several times at that – as I did Proust before starting the salon.
  • Henry James?
  • I like a topic which is covered in several books eg the Imaginary homelands idea. Maybe slavery, or family breakdown – and other topics about which much has been written. Or the work of a particular author – not just one book but a few showing how the author has developed.
  • Canterbury Tales
  • Kate Tempest, Bob Dylan – not sure I should put those two together. And, Seamus Heany with the Aeneid as well .
  • Marlon James – A Brief History of Seven Killings
  • I would love to study Ford Madox Ford
  • The Odyssey, myths

Thoughts on Power and the Word


7 October 2012
The last few Salons in London and Paris have raised questions around the power of language: how language evokes power, how language may represent the struggle with power (Faulkner’s grappling with the structures—grammar, words—of language as he questions his culture’s systems of power) how language can evoke such responses through the portrayal of horror and violence. These issues are coalescing for me as I prepare the Paradise Lost study starting this week in London. Milton, as the image of literary authority, was also the figure of power resistance in his time: it is his writings that articulated the first (and in England, only) anti-monarchical rebellion resulting in the overturning of divine authority—only to see this reversed in his lifetime.

There are moments when I am reading the news or biking through the city streets when I wonder how relevant the study of literature is in a world facing epic challenges and gross inequalities—not somewhere else, but here, in my neighbourhood in the air I breathe, the water I relish and the education systems shaping our young people. I return again to the relevance of the word—the way that language determines relationships, the way language is employed for power. In our studies—in any engagement with a challenging and significant work of literature, our ability to use language is increased. The analysis and understanding of the characters in the literature increases our ability to be in relationship with others; reveals the limits of our own perception, widens our sense of how one lives in the world. The Salons in their structure also force us each to enter into the minds of other participants: to respond, to disagree with respect, to be inspired by, to learn from their ideas.
The dynamic nature of the Salons means that they are created in response to the needs and desires of participants. I WELCOME any requests, suggestions and feedback.

Vote for Fall Salons London now

LONDON LITERARY SALON NEWS
23rd August 2012

FALL CHOICES

For the choices that interest you, mark preference for afternoon sessions, evening sessions, or one to two meeting intensives. There have been requests for more short intensives; while these offer an opportunity for a deep immersion, the struggle is to build a cohesive group in one or two meetings while covering the richness of the work. For some of the texts, I think this is particularly difficult therefore am scheduling two intensive meetings which would allow our work and momentum to move through the length of the work. For others, such as Paradise Lost, an intensive study is not ideal.

You can use the Doodle poll or simply contact me with your preferences in an email. Please complete this as soon as possible (by Monday August 27th noon at the latest) so I can announce the fall schedule with your input… the following will be scheduled (if there is interest) between the first week of September and mid-November. I am aiming for another Ulysseian spring so work in The Odyssey, Hamlet and The Portrait of the Artist are recommended if that is of interest.

*Descriptions for many of the following can be found by following the links to the website (please disregard the dates)*

The Aeneid by Virgil (Five two-hour meetings or two intensives)

Howard’s End by E. M. Forster (Five two-hour meetings or two intensives)

The Iliad with Christopher Logue’s War Music (Five two-hour meetings or two intensives)

“The Bear” by William Faulkner Short Story Intensive: one four-hour meeting

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (Five two-hour meetings or two intensives)

The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter (Four two-hour meetings or one intensive)

Paradise Lost by John Milton (Five two-hour meetings)

The Odyssey by Homer (Five two-hour meetings or two intensives)

Hamlet by William Shakespeare (Five two-hour meetings or two intensives)

Richard III by William Shakespeare (Five two-hour meetings or two intensives)

Bleak House by Charles Dickens (Five two-hour meetings)

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot (Three two-hour meetings or one intensive)

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