Meetings are led by Patrick Brownson and Michael Sevy. They take place every Tuesday at 6:30 PM ET for 90 minutes via Zoom (email [email protected] for Zoom link). Each week we discuss the assigned reading (see breakdown below) with participation voluntary. Attendees are asked to mute when not speaking and raise their hand to be called on by the leader.
Weekly Page Breakdown
László Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful. The Melancholy of Resistance, Satantango and Seiobo There Below are magnificent works of deep imagination and complex passions, in which the human comedy verges painfully onto transcendence. “The universality of Krasznahorkai’s writing rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.” – W. G. Sebald
“Seiobo There Below”
Apr. 9: Kamo-Hunter
The Exiled Queen
Apr. 16: The Preservation of a Buddha
Christo Morto
Apr. 23: Up on the Acropolis
He Rises at Dawn
A Murderer is Born
Apr. 30: The Life and Work of Master Inoue Kazuyuki
Il Ritorno in Perugia
May 7: Distant Mandate
Something is Burning Outside
Where You’ll Be Looking
Private Passion
May 14: Just a Dry Strip in the Blue
The Rebuilding of the Ise Shrine
May 21: Ze’Ami is Leaving
Screaming Beneath the Earth
Patrick Modiano is one of the most celebrated French novelists of his generation and recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. Good stories are often characterized by their exploration of universal but difficult questions, at the same time as they are grounded in everyday settings and historical events. Modiano’s works center around subjects like memory, oblivion, identity, and guilt.
“Missing Person”
Jun. 4: Chapter 1 through 16
Jun. 11: Chapter 17 to End
“Suspended Sentences”
Jun. 18: Afterimage
Jun. 25: Suspended Sentences
Jul. 2: Flowers of Ruin
Iris Murdoch, the novelist and philosopher kept the traditional novel alive, and in so doing changed what it is capable of. For decades this remarkable writer delivered prickly, sophisticated and somewhat unearthly fiction about good and evil and sex and morality.
“Under the Net”
Jul. 16: Beginning through Chapter 4
Jul. 23: Chapter 5 through 10
Jul. 30: Chapter 11 through 14
Aug. 6: Chapter 15 to End
“The Black Prince”
Aug. 13: Beginning through “I ran out of the house.”
Aug. 20: “Perhaps at this point in my story” through “his work might actually do Arnold good.”
Aug. 27: “That evening Priscilla seemed to be” through end of Part One
Sep. 3: Part Two through “I walked along blindly, grimacing with joy.”
Sep. 10: “I slept. I suppose.” through “I were young again, hiding under the counter in the shop.”
Sep. 17: “I awoke to a grey awful spotty early morning” to End
David Foster Wallace was a versatile writer of seemingly bottomless energy, he was a maximalist, exhibiting in his work a huge, even manic curiosity about the physical world, about the much larger universe of human feelings and about the complexity of living in America at the end of the 20th century.
“The Pale King”
Oct. 1: Beginning through Chapter 9
Oct. 8: Chapter 10 through 21
Oct. 15: Chapter 22
Oct. 22: Chapter 23 through 26
Oct. 29: Chapter 27 through 35
Nov. 5: Chapter 36 through 45
Nov. 12: Chapter 46 to End
Colum McCann is among the world’s foremost storytellers, moving seamlessly from the Troubles in Ireland to the Romani camps of Eastern Europe to the dizzying heights of the World Trade Center. A writer of style and substance, hailed by critics and readers alike, he is a poetic realist and a literary risk-taker, a writer who is known to tackle the dark in order to get through to the light—any sort of light, however compromised—on the far side.
“Let the Great World Spin”
Nov. 26: Those Who Saw him Hushed
All Respects to Heaven, I Like it Here
Dec. 3: Miró, Miró, on the Wall
A Fear of Love
Dec. 10: Let the Great World Spin Forever Down
Tag
Etherwest
This is the House that Horse Built
Dec. 17: The Ringing Grooves of Change
Part of the Parts
Centavos
Jan. 7, 2025: All Hail and Hallelujah
Roaring Seaward, and I Go
Saul Bellow, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, three National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize, transformed modern literature. He illuminated 20th-century American life through philosophical depth and a wild sense of humor. In addition to being an intellectual powerhouse, Bellow was also a controversial participant in America’s culture wars: a man both praised and reviled for his willingness to confront the issues of literacy, race, sex, crime and class.
“Henderson the Rain King”
Jan. 14: Beginning through Chapter 7
Jan. 21: Chapter 8 through 12
Jan. 28: Chapter 13 through 17
Feb. 4: Chapter 18 to End
“Herzog”
Feb. 11: Beginning through “As for me, I was your patient . . .”
Feb. 18: Chapter beginning with “Dear Governor Stevenson, Herzog wrote” through “-she too must be in the cemetery.”
Feb. 25: Chapter beginning with “The telephone rang-five, eight, then peals.” through “No, entirely mortal, but human.”
Mar. 4: Section beginning with “As he was putting on his shirt he made plans” to “They shook hands.”
Mar. 11: Chapter beginning with “At last he embraced his daughter” to End
Thomas Pynchon helped pioneer the postmodern aesthetic. His formidable body of work challenges readers to think and perceive in ways that anticipate—with humor, insight, and cogency—much that has emerged in the field of literary theory over the past few decades.
“Gravity’s Rainbow”
Mar. 25: Beginning through Chapter 1 “with a look that says try to tickle me.”
Apr. 1: Chapter 1 “TDY Abreaction Ward” through Chapter 1 “would you say the next one will fall?”
Apr. 8: Chapter 1 “The very first touch:” through end of Chapter 1
Apr. 15: Chapter 2 through Chapter 2 “But perhaps, in the hours just before dawn . . .”
Apr. 22: Chapter 2 “The great cusp -“ through end of Chapter 2
Apr. 29: Chapter 3 through Chapter 3 “That’s where I broke through the speed of sound . . .”
May. 6: Chapter 3 “The Zone is in full summer” through Chapter 3 “They both start cackling insanely there, under the tree.”
May. 13: Chapter 3 “Slothrop comes to in episodes” through Chapter 3 “and the dogs run barking in the backstreets.”
May. 20: Chapter 3 “When emptied of people” through Chapter 3 “orchestra plays Tristan und Isolde.”
May. 27: Chapter 3 “They come out into the last of the twilight.” through Chapter 3 “Safe passage through a bad night . . .”
Jun. 3: Chapter 3 “The Schwarzkommando have got to Achtfaden” through end of Chapter 3
Jun. 10: Chapter 4 through Chapter 4 “There are things to hold on to . . .”
Jun. 17: Chapter 4 “You will want cause and effect.” through Chapter 4 “just at the other aide of dawning, you can see a smile.”
Jun. 24: Chapter 4 “In her pack, Geli Tripping” to End
New England Readers and Writers is a voluntary group hosting free workshops serving curious readers and aspiring writers. Our current workshop leaders are:
Michael L. Sevy – Literature Group
…Currently co-leading the Literature Group, Michael recently retired from a career beginning in advertising (including writing and editing for various trade magazines) then working as a database administrator for a financial software company. Composing and playing music from punk rock to ambient and classical minimalism has been a constant throughout. A fiction writer, he has been published in 3:AM Magazine.
Michael tries to keep the Lit Group weekly sessions lively with an emphasis on deep analysis of difficult works and explorations of experimental prose and form. Leaning toward long, slow non-narrative fiction in his own reading, favorite authors include László Krasznahorkai, Clarice Lispector, Natsume Sōseki, Marguerite Duras, Robert Musil and Georges Perec.
Short story by Michael published here: https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-melodic-line-that-obsessed-my-thoughts/
Some of Michael’s music can be heard here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL35AAAEE961CAC765
Patrick Brownson – Literature Group
…got his B.A. in Honors English Literature and Western Society & Culture from Concordia University, in Montreal, QC. He is currently co-leader of the Literature Group which started as a small group of readers tackling “Infinite Jest” in the summer of 2013, and became a year-round Lit. group in the summer of 2015. He has also spent time as fiction co-editor and manuscript reader at the Mud Season Review. He is the father of a 5-year-old boy, Wallace and an infant girl, Sylvia.
Below are the books previously discussed in the group:
Elena Ferrante – My Brilliant Friend
Don DeLillo – White Noise
Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities
David Foster Wallace – Infinite Jest
William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom
Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita
James Baldwin – Giovanni’s Room
James Joyce – Ulysses
Ali Smith – How To Be Both
Clarice Lispector – The Passion According to G .H.
George Eliot – Middlemarch
Dennis Johnson – Angels and Jesus’ Son
Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
Herman Melville – Moby Dick
Georges Perec – Life, A User’s Manual
Anna Burns – Milkman
Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Brothers Karamazov
Enrique Vila-Matas – Mac’s Problem
Gerald Murnane – Barley Patch
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Americanah
Octavia E. Butler – Parable of the Sower
Don DeLillo – Underworld
Albert Camus – The Plague
José Saramago – Blindness
Giovanni Boccaccio – The Decameron
Vladimir Nabokov – Pnin
Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire
Samuel Beckett – Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)
William Faulkner – The Hamlet
Malcolm Lowry – Under The Volcano
Yoko Tawada – The Emissary
Yoko Ogawa – The Memory Police
Edna O’Brien – A Pagan Place
Alice Munro – Lives of Girls and Women
Nikolai Gogol – Dead Souls
Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children
Lucia Berlin – A Manual for Cleaning Women
Alfred Doblin – Berlin Alexanderplatz
Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook
Philip Roth – Zuckerman Bound
W. G. Sebald – Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn
Mariam Petrosyan – The Gray House
Olga Tokarczuk – Flights
J. M. Coetzee – Age of Iron and Disgrace
Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse and The Waves
William Gaddis – The Recognitions
Annie Ernaux – A Man’s Place, A Woman’s Story and Shame
Orhan Pamuk – My Name is Red
Laurence Sterne – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
César Aira – An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Varamo, The Little Buddhist Monk and The Divorce
Roberto Bolaño – Distant Star
Toni Morrison – Song of Solomon and Jazz