In their enigmatic song “Once in a Lifetime,” Talking Heads ask:
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife/ And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”…
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful house”/ And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful wife”…
You may ask yourself, “What is that beautiful house?”/ You may ask yourself, “Where does that highway go to?”/ And you may ask yourself, “Am I right, am I wrong?”/ And you may say to yourself, “My God, what have I done?”

From September 2022 to May 2023, the “Outsiders” reading group will meet to discuss a deeply varied set of texts from Biblical and Classical times to the present moment. We will read broadly and comparatively. Beginning with The Book of Job and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, we will consider the roles of fate, divine intervention and free will in human life, especially in the experience of suffering. We will go on to the mid-19th and early 20th century with Melville’s Bartleby, Dostoyevsky’s underground man, and Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, looking closely at family, the workplace, and “underground” spaces to explore social anxiety, urban anomie, and alienation. With Camus’ Meursault, Orwell’s Winston Smith, and Ellison’s invisible man, we’ll explore social, political, and racial dimensions of the individual within society. Continuing with Nabokov and Sebald, we’ll look at emigration, displacement, and reclusiveness, concluding with contemporary texts by Rabih Alameddine and Jenny Erpenbeck.

Our reading schedule will be mostly chronological and focused on single works. But at the start of our schedule, we will consider particular pairings of shorter works: Job with Oedipus; “Bartleby” with The Metamorphosis; and Notes from Underground with The Stranger. Looking at these works together, from the perspective of the theme of “outsiders,” should bring fresh, new insights to these extensively analyzed texts.

The Athenæum is hosting two identical sections of the “Outsiders” reading group from September 2022 to May 2023, one on the second Tuesday of each month and one on the second Wednesday of each month, from 5:30-7pm. The Tuesday section will meet in person in the Reading Room (lower level) of the library. The Wednesday section will meet virtually via Zoom. The meeting days will always be back-to-back. Participants will be asked to select their preferred meeting session during registration.

At present, group refreshments will not be organized for the Tuesday meetings.

Monthly reading assignments will vary from under 200 pages to over 500 pages. A typical assignment will be about 300 pages in length. Readers are free to choose the editions of their choice. Recommended print editions are provided below.

Note on editions: For the first three meetings in particular, different texts of these classic works are available. If you already have a copy in another edition or by another translator, there is no need to obtain the recommended one. Readers should take care if selecting electronic editions, especially of older materials now in the public domain; they may be faulty or incomplete.

Tues, September 13 & Wed, September 14
Job: A New Translation (2019). Yale University Press, translation by Edward L. Greenstein. ~100 pages of text, adjusted for notes. [The Book of Job] Sophocles, Oedipus the King. In The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Penguin Classics, translation by Robert Fagles. 92 pages [Oedipus the King, text only].

Tues, October 11 & Wed, October 12
Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). In Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories. Penguin Classics. 38 pages [“Bartleby” only].
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915). Norton, translation by Susan Bernofsky. 118 pages.

Tues, November 8 & Wed, November 9
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864). Vintage Classics, translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. 132 pages.
Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942). Vintage International, translation by Matthew Ward. 123 pages.

Tues, December 13 & Wed, December 14
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). Signet Classics. 312 pages.

Tues, January 10 & Wed, January 11
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952). Vintage International. 581 pages.

Tues, February 7 & Wed, February 8
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962). Vintage. 224 pages.

Tues, March 7 & Wed, March 8
W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1992). New Directions, translation by Michael Hulse. 237 pages.

Tues, April 11 & Wed, April 12
Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman (2013). Grove Press. 291 pages.

Tues, May 9 & Wed, May 10 *Tuesday Meeting OFFSITE at The First Unitarian Church*
Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone (2015). New Directions, translation by Susan Bernofsky. 283 pages.

Tues, June 13 & Wed, June 14
Optional meetings for catch up and/or celebration

The “outsider” theme is rich and varied. Considering just the 20th and 21st centuries, the following works may be of interest to those who want to read further. The foreign works in this very selective list are all available in English translation.

Emmanuel Bove, My Friends (1915)
Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage to the End of the Night (1932)
Henri Michaux, Plume (1936)
Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)
Albert Camus, The Fall (1956)
Violette Leduc, La Bâtarde (1964)
S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders (1967)
Tove Ditlevsen, The Copenhagen Trilogy (1967-71)
Hervé Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990)
W. G. Sebald, Vertigo (1990)
W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
Mathias Énard, Street of Thieves (2012)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (2014)
Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (2014)

Athenæum member Steve Coon leads the reading group as facilitator. Steve earned a Ph.D. from Brown University in Comparative Literature, with a focus on 19th and 20th century fiction and poetry. Since 2012, he has led reading groups every year at the Athenaeum, including groups on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Balzac & Baudelaire in Paris, Roberto Bolaño, W. G. Sebald, Melville & Conrad, and most recently a three-year excursion into the theme of love: “French Kisses” and “More French Kisses” on French fiction from the 17th century to the present, and “Love Actually” on modern British fiction. Steve also leads the Athenaeum Film Club. Steve emphasizes that the reading group is not a “class,” but rather an opportunity for interested readers of all backgrounds to explore and engage with some of the most important and challenging works in all of world literature.