Penn alumni: Take my free online book group!

book group 55: September 12-22, 2011 (10 days)

Aleksandar Hemon and Lorrie Moore: Love & Obstacles in Contemporary Short Fiction
led by Courtney Zoffness

Courtney Zoffness

Many of the classic love stories we most revere revolve around ill-fated courtships. Romeo & Juliet. Anna Karenina. While storytelling styles may have evolved since Shakespeare and Tolstoy, the themes have endured. “How to Be the Other Woman” by Lorrie Moore and “Love & Obstacles” by Aleksandar Hemon both follow characters down misguided paths to intimacy and affection. As a group, we’ll explore how Moore and Hemon, two vastly different but widely acclaimed contemporary authors, use a range of narrative techniques to create drama and impact our sympathies. What’s the effect of Moore’s second-person point of view—one that implicates us in her heroine’s infidelity? How does the threat of war in Bosnia reflect in the sexually desperate young boy’s misadventures in Hemon’s “Love and Obstacles”? And what compels us, despite the cynicism buried even in these stories’ titles, to read on?

To enroll, go HERE.

reads in progress

Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs. Not yet finished, but I still concede a wee bit of disappointment—if only because I'm so dazzled by her short stories.

Paul Yoon's Once the Shore: artful and enchanting narratives by former fellow Bread Loafer.

Slowly chiseling away at Darwin's The Descent of Man, as research for a novel I'm writing, and The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism, in preparation for a nonfiction course I'll be teaching in the spring.

And I've definitely overestimated what I thought I could read during winter break ... Have a back-breaking bag of paperbacks that will likely have to wait their turn. Sigh.