Gather online with fellow Tigers and delve into a range of literary fiction!
Meeting Schedule: 3rd Monday every month at 7:30 PM
Questions & Zoom Links: devan.kreisberg@gmail.com and domjparisi@aol.com
Next Meetings:
April 20, 2026: Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville (100 pages). Academics hail it as the beginning of modernism, but to readers around the world, Bartleby the Scrivener is simply one of the most absorbing and moving novellas ever. Set in the mid-19th century on New York City’s Wall Street, it was also, perhaps, Herman Melville’s most prescient story: What if a young man caught up in the rat race of commerce finally just said, “I would prefer not to”?
May 18, 2026: James, Percival Everett (320 pages). It takes a lot of ambition, skill and vision to reinvent one of the most iconic books in American letters, but Percival Everett demonstrates he possesses those virtues in droves in James. The novel is a radical reworking of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, telling the story not from Huck’s perspective, but from the point of view of the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi River: Jim – or, as he clarifies, James. From James’s eyes, we see he is no mere sidekick but rather a thinker and a writer who is code-switching as illiterate and fighting desperately for freedom. Everett’s novel is a literary hat trick: a book that highlights the horrors in American history and complicates an American classic, all also emerging as a work of exquisite originality, in its own right.
June 15, 2026: The Master, Colm Toibin (352 pages). An international literary sensation, Colm Tóibín’s brilliant and profoundly moving novel tells the story of celebrated writer Henry James. As it looks back into James’s past, the narrative’s present day takes place over the course of five significant years in the author’s life, during which he produced a sequence of major novels that came into being at a high personal cost. In stunningly resonant prose, Tóibín capturesnineteenth-century European landscapes and the loneliness and longing, the hope and despair of a man who never married and never resolved his sexual identity, whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. Time and again, James, a master of psychological subtlety in his fiction, proves blind to his own heart.
July 20, 2026: My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante (331 pages). The first novel in Elena Ferrante’s four-part Neapolitan series, My Brilliant Friend chronicles the complex, decades-long friendship between the narrator Elena (Lenù) and the fiery Lila as they grow up in a poor neighborhood in Naples, Italy, starting in the 1950s. The book explores their diverging paths – Lila's forced departure from school and Elena's pursuit of education – and explores themes of class, gender, violence, and the transformative power of their bond, which is set against the backdrop of a changing Italy.