Brilliant Minds — Spring 2023 Readings:

Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans. Walsh (Oxford)

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, eds. Mowat & Werstine (Folger)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Watts (Oxford)

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise (New Press)

Louise Glück, The Wild Iris (Ecco)

Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees (Penguin) 

You can also find these editions on our Bookshop.org site, which helps support local and independent bookstores.

Please note: these links, including the ones on the sidebar, are affiliate links for which we receive a small commission and which helps to maintain this site.

Here is our reading list in recommended editions for Fall 2022:

Euripides, Hippolytus, trans. Grene, in Euripides I (U Chicago) 

William Shakespeare, The Tempest, eds. Mowat & Werstine (Folger) 

Jean Racine, Phèdre, trans. Ted Hughes (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward (Vintage)

Margaret Atwood, Hag-Seed (Hogarth)

Kamel Daoud, The Mersault Investigation, trans. John Cullen (Oneworld)

You can also find these editions on our Bookshop.org site, which helps support local and independent bookstores.

Please note: these links, including the ones on the sidebar, are affiliate links for which we receive a small commission and help keep this site up and running.

Here is the list for our Summer reading!

Wild Swims, by Dorthe Nors

The Committed, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021, by Yusef Komunyakaa

In Memory of Memory, by Maria Stepanova 

Walking on Cowrie Shells, by Nana Nkweti

Sea of Tranquility: A novel, by Emily St. John Mandel 

Klara and the Sun links:

A Humanoid Who Cares For Humans, From the Mind of Kazuo Ishiguro (NYTimes review)

'Klara And The Sun' Is A Masterpiece About Life, Love And Mortality  (NPR review)

The Radiant Inner Life of a Robot (Atlantic review) 

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro review – another masterpiece (Guardian review) 

Bomb Under the Table: On Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun”  (LA Review of Books)

Kazuo Ishiguro on Klara and the Sun (Video/Waterstones)

Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro on his new book, Klara and the Sun (Video/Kennys)

Kazuo Ishiguro talks about ‘Klara and the Sun,’ ‘GMA’s’ March Book Club pick (Video/ABC News)

Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation with Kate Mosse for World Book Night (Video/British Library)

Kazuo Ishiguro: A Nobel Novelist Searches for Hope | The Agenda (Video)

Nobel Lecture: Kazuo Ishiguro, Nobel Prize in Literature 2017 (Video) 

Ishiguro and AI:

Kazuo Ishiguro Uses Artificial Intelligence to Reveal the Limits of Our Own (The New Yorker)

Kazuo Ishiguro thinks artificial intelligence could replace human novelists (Literary Hub)

Kazuo Ishiguro: 'AI, gene-editing, big data ... I worry we are not in control of these things any more' (Guardian) 

Klara and the Sun Imagines a Social Schism Driven by AI (Wired)

Nobel author Kazuo Ishiguro on artificial intelligence, and what it means to be human (CBC)

The Books Briefing: Boundaries Between Humans and Machines Are Vanishing (Atlantic)

The impact of artificial intelligence on human love - Kazuo Ishiguro (Channel 4)

Nobel-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro on artificial intelligence and love  (Channel 4)

Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘When AI is writing our constitutions we should worry’ I FT (Financial Times)

Sophocles, Philoctetes, trans. Meineck (Hackett Classics) 

Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Plautus, The Pot of Gold, in Four Comedies, trans. Segal (Oxford UP)

Molière, The Miser, trans. Wood & Coward (Penguin Classics)

Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, eds. Mowat & Werstine (Folger)

Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time (Hogarth)

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Davies (Penguin Classics)

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, intro. Danticat (Norton) 

Here are links related to our recent discussion of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française:

David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair

Fire in the Blood

The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irene Nemirovsky by her Daughter

A Strange and Beautiful Book About a Mother Who Disappeared

Franz Werfel:

Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand

Eine blaßblaue Frauenschrift

Hamsun on America

Southern Agragrians

NICOLAISEN, PETER. “The Southern Agrarians and European Agrarianism.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 4, Mississippi State University, 1996, pp. 683–700, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26475898.

John Berger: Into Their Labours

Growth of the Soil (film)

Mysteries (film)