Calendar

Please note: due to other commitments of the organiser, there are currently no upcoming meetings scheduled for this reading group. If you would like to help and join forces, please contact the organiser to discuss options to collaborate and resume the meetings.

 

NEXT MEETINGS, TOPICS, AUTHORS, and TEXTS WE WILL READ FROM:

Ready for future meetings:

“Cross-dressing” in literature:

• Ariosto, Orlando furioso, Canto XXV, stanzas XIX-LXX
• Abbé de Choisy, Aventures de l’Abbé de Choisy habillé en femme [1737], English: The Transvestite Memoirs of Abbé de Choisy
• Lord Byron, Don Juan (1821), Cantos V and VI
• Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834)
• Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yentl the Yeshiva Boy (1962)
• H.E. Bates, The Triple Echo (1970)

 

PAST MEETINGS AND WHAT WE READ

22 November 2022: Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, Day 2, Novel 9

17 May 2022: Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

3 May 2022: Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia

24 Mach 2022: Anna Akhmatova, selection from Requiem; Osip Mandelstam, “Verses on the Unknown Soldier;” W. H. Auden, “Musée de Beaux Arts” — as part of the theme Wars.

17 March 2022: Beidao, “The Answer”; Rupert Brooke, “1914: The Soldier”; May Herschel-Clarke, “The Mother”; Paul Celan, “Winter”; and Gianni Rodari, “La luna di Kiev” [The Moon in Kyiv] — as part of the theme Wars.

10 March 2022: Bertolt Brecht, some poems from Svendborger Gedichte [Svendborg Poems’]; Andreas Gryphius, “Thränen des Vaterlandes” [Tears of the Fatherland]; and Paul Gerhardt, “Befiehl du deine Wege” [Commit Thy Way] — as part of the theme Wars.

3 March 2022: Albert Camus, La peste [The Plague]

24 February 2022: Mary Shelley, The Last Man

7 February 2022: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mask of the Red Death” and Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi [The Betrothed]

31 January 2022: Giovanni Boccaccio, Introduction to the First Day of the Decameron

17 January 2022: Giacomo Leopardi, “Dialogo di un venditore d’almanacchi e di un passeggere” [Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-by]; Virginia Woolf, diary entries of 1 and 18 January 1915, extracts; and Dante, Inferno, X, 22-81, 94-114

10 December 2021: Paola Masino, Nascita e morte della massaia [Birth and Death of the Housewife]

29 November 2021: Italo Calvino, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore [If on a winter’s night a traveler]