Let's Talk About It
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Bricklane by Monica Ali
Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
The American Revolution: A History by Gordon S. Wood
Benjamin Franklin by Edmund S. Morgan
The Minutemen and their World by Robert Gross
Women of the Republic by Linda Kerber
Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution by John Ferling
Uncommon Waters: Women Write About Fishing by Holly Morris
The Natural by Bernard Malamud
Laughing in the Hills by Bill Barich
My Old Man and the Sea: A Father and Son Sail Cape Horn by David Hays and Daniel Hays
Jesse Owen: An American Life by William Baker
A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe
Women on Hunting by Pam Houston
On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates
Friday Night Lights by H. G. Bissinger
In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle by Madeleine Blais
Winterdance by Gary Paulsen
Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (J.D. McClatchy, editor)
Nineteenth-Century American Poet (Penguin Classics)
Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
An Orphan in History by Paul Cowan
The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday
Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
The format will be a little different from our normal Let’s Talk About It programs. Groups will meet 3 times with a facilitator/scholar who specializes in the Middle East. The readings for both sessions will be from The Contemporary Middle East, edited by Karl Yambert, a new, accessible anthology of writings by leading scholars incorporating historical, cultural, and political perspectives of the region. To provide participants with background and context, each session will begin with a 45-minute presentation by the facilitator, followed by approximately an hour and a quarter of facilitated discussion and questions.
My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass
With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen Oates
Collected Black Women's Narratives ed. Anthony G. Barthelemy
Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate by Eli Evans
Portraits of American Women ed G.J. Barker-Benfield and Catherine Clinton
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Civil Wars by Rosellen Brown
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Transformations by Anne Sexton
Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston
Grendel by John Gardner
The Life and Loves of a She Devil by Faye Weldon
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
Fools Crow by James Welch
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
Tracks by Louise Erdrich
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie, and the film Smoke Signals
The Sharpest Sight by Louis Owens
Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi'Kmaq Poet by Rita Joe, Lynn Henry
The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau.
The Wilderness from Chamberlain Farm: A Story of Hope for the American Wild by Dean Bennett
Fly Rod Crosby: the Woman Who Marketed Maine by A. Hunter and Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr.
Campfires Rekindled by George S. Kephart
We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich
Defining Wilderness: Defining Maine, Collected Readings
The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion (Paperback) by Friedrich Durrenmatt (Author), Joel Agee (Translator)
Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers
The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker
"A" is for Alibi by Sue Grafton
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Morgan's Passing by Anne Tyler
A Mother and Two Daughters by Gail Godwin
Lolita by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The Tree by John Fowles
Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
Tales of Gluskap the Trickster
Song of Rita Joe; Autobiography of a Mi’Kmaq Poet by Rita Joe and Lynn Henry
Turnip Pie by Rebecca Cummings
Papa Martel by Gerard Robichaud
The Clear Blue Lobster-Water Country (Book Three) by Leo Connellan
The Girl Who Would Be Russian by Willis Johnson
Maine Speaks: An Anthology of Maine Literature
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Plague by Albert Camus
The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
W;t by Margaret Edson
The Waiting Years by Enchi Fumiko
The Makioka Sisters by Tanizaki Junichirô
The Setting Sun by Dazai Osamu
A Personal Matter by Nobel laureate Ôe Kenzaburô
Good-bye Tsugumi by Yoshimoto Banana
Since Yesterday: the Nineteen-Thirties in America by Frederick Lewis Allen
The Disinherited by Jack Conroy
Tender is the Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright
The Devil and the White City by Erik Larson
The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells
Poland Spring: A Tale of the Gilded Age by David Richards
"The Seafarer" 10th-century poem
"Youth" by Joseph Conrad
Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
"Dauber" by John Masefield
The Log of the Skipper's Wife by James Balano
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
The Republic by Plato
Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Living is Easy, by Dorothy West, is about the life of a middle class black family in Boston, inspired by West's own experiences and her observations about social class in the black community in the early 20th century.
Like Lesser Gods, by Mari Tomasi, is a novel about a community of Italian immigrant stonecutters living in a small Vermont town during the 1920s.
The Family, by David Plante, is an autobiographical novel about a Francophone family in a French-Canadian enclave of Providence, Rhode Island in the 1950s.
All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, by Michael Patrick MacDonald. This memoir takes us into the projects of South Boston in the 1970s and 1980s, where poverty, drugs and violence besiege a predominantly Irish Catholic community.
The Wooden Nickel, by William Carpenter, is a novel about the struggles of a contemporary Maine lobsterman to survive in a world he no longer understands.
One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty
Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinor Pruitt Stewart
Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston
My Life by Isadora Duncan
Blackberry Winter by Margaret Mead
Maine in the Age of Discovery: Christopher Levett's Voyage, 1623-1624.
The Indian Peoples of Eastern America by James Axtell
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
The Land of Norumbega (exhibition catalog)
Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
Dutchman's Flat by Louis L'Amour
Cogewea, the Half Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range by Mourning Dove
This House of Sky by Ivan Doig
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, published in 1916, the year the Easter Rising initiated Ireland’s war for independence, represents Joyce’s own manifesto of intellectual and artistic liberation.
The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien, brought Edna O’Brien early literary success and international acclaim; it also gave her much notoriety in Ireland when it was banned by the Catholic censorship board for its bold treatment of sexual and religious themes.
The Collected Stories by John McGahern most of these masterful stories are set during the author’s upbringing in the 1940s and 50s, in the conservative, agrarian Ireland of the de Valera years.
Antarctica by Claire Keegan this debut collection from one of Ireland’s most exciting new fiction writers received the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish literature in 2000.
A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle bringing the series full circle to 1916, A Star Called Henry takes a gritty look at the Easter Rising and subsequent War of Independence through the upbringing of its title character, Henry Starr, a boy who seems part mythic hero, part self-inspired tall tale.
Mountains Beyond Mountains : The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, the Man Who Would Cure the World by by Tracy Kidder
Plainsong by Kent Haruf
The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri
The Late George Apley by J.P. Marquand
Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
Lying Awake by Mark Salzman
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Growing Up by Russell Baker
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
The Professor's House by Willa Cather
Working by Studs Terkel
Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy
A Maine Hamlet by Lura Beam
Wildfire Loose by Joyce Butler
Salem's Lot by Stephen King
Twelve Journeys in Maine by Wesley McNair
The Weir by Ruth Moore
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Maine Speaks: An Anthology of Maine Literature
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
As the Earth Turns by Gladys Hasty Carroll
The Classic Fairy Tales by Iona and Peter Opie
Tatterhood by Ethel Johnston Phelps
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor
I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Kehinde by Buchi Emecheta
The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat
The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories by Stewart Brown and John Wickham, ed. Oxford University Press, selected short stories.
Wide Sargasso Sea (Dominica) by Jean Rhys. Offended by Charlotte Bronte’s reference to Mrs. Rochester as a “Creole lunatic in the attic” in Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys, herself a Creole from Dominica (a person of European heritage born in the Caribbean), determined to explain how Mrs. Rochester came to be in the attic.
Another Life (St. Lucia) by Derek Walcott. This book-long poetic account of the Nobel Prize winner’s early life is a highly evocative record of his life after his father’s early death.
A Small Place (Antigua) by Jamaica Kincaid. Kincaid talks about her homeland of Antigua, the colonial and post-colonial relationship with England, and along the way, touches on most of the important concerns of the contemporary Caribbean.
Caribbean Passion (Jamaica) by Opal Palmer Adisa. This is a collection of poems, written in both standard English and Jamaican patois, from an accomplished novelist, poet and storyteller.
Krik? Krak! (Haiti) by Edwidge Danticat. This is a collection of short stories from a young Haitian writer whose subsequent first novel was an Oprah Book Club selection.
The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
Collected Lyrics by Edna St. Vincent Millay
One Man's Meat by E. B. White
As We Are Now by May Sarton
The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie King
Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman
The Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison
A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow
Murder at the Nightwood Bar by Katherine V. Forrest
Inspector Morimoto and the Japanese Cranes: A Detective Story Set in Japan [alternate text, may be substituted for one of the above titles] by Timothy Hemion
Two Roads to Sumter by William & Bruce Catton
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Ordeal by Fire, Volume II: The Civil War by James M. McPherson
Reconstruction: After the Civil War by John Hope Franklin
The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries edited by C. Vann Woodward
Biography of a Runaway Slave (Esteban Montejo) by Miguel Barnet
The Chase by Alejo Carpentier
Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia
In the Cold of the Malecon & Other Stories by Antonio Jose Ponte
Havana Red by Leonardo Padura Fuentes
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy
The Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives by Carolyn Kay Steedman
In My Mother's House by Kim Chernin
This series uses a lively selection of readings to approach a central and sometimes thorny issue in American society: philanthropy. Readings are drawn from a new anthology edited by Amy Kass entitled The Perfect Gift: the Philanthropic Imagination in Poetry and Prose and include short selections by Edith Wharton, O. Henry, Sarah Orne Jewett, C.S. Lewis, Aristotle, P.G. Wodehouse, George Eliot, Jane Addams, Rudyard Kipling, John O'Hara, His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, Woodrow Wilson, Shakespeare and Andrew Carnegie.
This special series is supported by Thoughtful Giving: Philanthropy As Civic Engagement, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This House of Sky by Ivan Doig
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansbury
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
"The Stone Boy" by Gina Berriault,
"A&P" by John Updike, and "The Five-Forty-Eight" by John Cheever in Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories ed. Moffett & McElheny
During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Shane by Jack Schaefer
From Here to Eternity by James Jones
A Tan and Sandy Silence by John D. MacDonald
Two Old Women by Velma Wallis
Dogsong by Gary Paulsen
Holes by Louis Sachar
Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli
Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
The Commitments by Roddy Doyle
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
Climbing the God Tree: A Novel in Stories by Jaimee Wriston Colbert
Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing edited by Bell Gale Chevigny
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
A New England Town: The First Hundred Years by Kenneth Lockridge
A New England Girlhood by Lucy Larcom
Amoskaeg: Life and Work In a New England Factory City by Tamara Hareven
"Happy Times in Mill City" by Ann Sullivan
Without a Farmhouse Near by Deborah Rawson
