Course Description

History as Fiction and Fiction as History (book  discussion)

Join as in reading five acclaimed historical novels. We begin with Margaret Walker’s classic, Jubilee, a story of her grandmother, a biracial slave in the 19th century south. We follow with Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer, a story of a conflicted communist sympathizer in Vietnam by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Next, we read Euphoria, based loosely on Margaret Mead’s love affair with Gregory Bateson on New Guinea’s Sepik River. We continue with what critics are calling  a masterpiece, The Book of Aron, Jim Shepherd’s tale of a child in Holocaust Germany. We finish with another masterpiece, The Noise of Time, the fictionalization of three periods in the life of Dimitri Shostakovach by Booker– prize winner Julian Barnes.