Recommended Reading List

Congratulations! Now your job is to relax / idle / explore for the summer. Here are some books that I've thought were great over the last few years.

Aimee Bender's The Girl in the Flammable Skirt - A short story collection that I really can't recommend enough. Think "magical realism."

Anything by David Foster Wallace - You can find a number of his essays online here, Where I recommend beginning with "Shipping Out," about a cruise ship. In terms of fiction, why not start with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men or his first novel, The Broom of the System. Also check out Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies or Unaccustomed Earth. Junot Diaz: Drown, a collection of stories about (young) Dominican Americans in New York and New Jersey. Make Believe, by Joanna Scott; "The Secret Integration," a story in Thomas Pynchon's Slow Learner.

Just south of the US I recommend checking out the Mexican / Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño; maybe begin with his story collection Last Evenings on Earth before moving on to his Savage Detectives. From Brazil, I can't get enough of Clairce Lispector, particularly her Hour of the Star. Also, anything by the Argentines César Aira, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar. In Praise of the Stepmother, by Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru).

From India, check out Aravind Adiga's White Tiger and Arundati Roy's The God of Small Things. From Africa, The Book of Chameleons; Ngugi wa Thiong'o, The Devil on the Cross.

As for biographies, I just read one on Shakespeare, Will in the World, and one of the French "Symbolist" poet, Arthur Rimbaud, both of which are fantastic.

If you read one and like it, why not leave a comment below? Or recommend something that you like! Happy Reading!

Final Exams and Papers!

I just sent an email to all of you with the finalized rules and regulations for the final papers and exams; the final exam questions have also been included there. If for some reason you did not receive that email or cannot read it's formatting, please email me and I will resend it.

I have office hours tomorrow, Tuesday (6/22) in B507, from 1pm to 6pm; please stop by if you have any questions!

My summer reading recommendations will be posted here soon! Here's one of them, pasted to the side here: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. In my opinion the best satire written in the U.S. in the last 100 years... (though several others come close; I'll post those too!).

(PS.-The title comes from Jonathan Swift)

4pm Class Start on Tuesday, and Final Paper

First off, this Tuesday's class (6/15) will start at 4pm. The readings are Part IV of Gulliver's Travels.

If you would like to write a final paper instead of taking the take-home exam (both will be approx. 5 pages, double-spaced), by Monday (6/14) please email me:

• Two paragraphs describing what you want to write about
• A possible thesis statement
• Type out 3 key quotes for your argument

The goal of your paper is to do a close reading of several key passages where you make an argument about a particular author(s) take on a theme. To begin, I recommend investigating a question that puzzles you: how does the Fool act as a comment on King Lear? Why is the body so important in Gulliver's Travels? Is Thomas More really putting forth a viable economic system in Utopia?

And don't forget, you are welcome to compare any text / film we've read / seen, provided one of the things you're comparing is Lear, Gulliver's Travels, or Utopia.

More soon!