“Serious” fiction tends to be set in real places, like Russia or Tokyo, while “genre” fiction is set in fictional worlds, like Arrakis or Middle Earth. In this group we’ll read stories that are set somewhere in between: made-up places in our own world.

Join us as we explore realistic(ish) works set in fictional lands, each with their own unique histories, cultures, and geographies. Moving mostly chronologically from Plato’s description of Atlantis to a 2017 novel about Victorian missionaries trying to convert fairies, we’ll encounter a myriad of allegorical, utopian, satirical, postcolonial, and metaphysical visions of society.

The Irrational Geographic reading group meets monthly from September 2021 to June 2022 at the Athenæum, on the third Tuesday of the month from 5:30-7pm.

Our friends at Brown Bookstore are generously offering participants a 20% discount with promo code BOOKCLUB20. Click here to view titles.

*VIRTUAL MEETING* Tues, September 21
Critias by Plato
The Birds by Aristophanes

Tues, October 19
Utopia by Thomas More
New Atlantis by Francis Bacon
The Isle of Pines by Henry Neville
(all collected in Oxford World Classics Three Early Modern Utopias)

Tues, November 16
The Green Child by Herbert Read
Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidian Adventures in Mountain Climbing by René Daumal

Tues, December 21
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges (short story from the collection Fictions)
“On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1” by Umberto Eco (essay from How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays)
“Supertopia” by Dung Kai-Cheung (chapter excerpt from Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City)

Tues, January 18
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Tues, February 15
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Tues, March 15
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
“Subtopia” by Dung Kai-Cheung (chapter excerpt from Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City)

Tues, April 19
Orsinian Tales by Ursula K. Le Guin (also collected in The Complete Orsinia)

Tues, May 17
Hav by Jan Morris (New York Review of Books Classics)

Thurs, June 9
Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng

Jonathan Migliori is a Providence native and teacher with a degree in Classics and Medieval Cultures from Brown University. When he isn’t doing this he is running RI’s hardest pub quiz, lecturing for Viking Cruises, or eating.

Bonnie Clayton is a Rhode Island native and Providence resident who graduated with a BA in English from the University of Hawaii. A former literacy instructor, she is currently doing the Devil’s work as a proofreader and copyeditor.