Four Mondays: October 16, 23, 30, and November 6, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET Online
When readers think of the American expat novel, our minds often reach all the way back to Hemingway and Fitzgerald—to images of wandering Lost Generation novelists thinking and drinking their way through postwar France and Spain. But the genre is alive and kicking in the twenty-first century, bustling with ideas as our conception of America and Americans rapidly changes in the post-9/11 world. In this course, we will read four novels from the very recent past that take us to Bulgaria, Nigeria, Spain, and Netherlands. We will visit familiar settings like cafes in Madrid where poets drink wine and argue about art, but we’ll also visit settings that weren’t available to the Lost Generation. An internet café in Lagos where internet scams are birthed. A public bathroom in Sofia where an English teacher and a hustler start a clandestine affair. And a war crimes tribunal at the Hague where a translator must navigate a thorny maze of gender and power. We will discuss what it means to be an American abroad in our time and explore how four exciting contemporary authors use the novel form to interrogate that meaning.
Four Mondays: October 16, 23, 30, and November 6, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET Online
Required Books:
Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole (9780812985856)
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell (9781250117892)
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura (9780399576171)
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner (9781566892742)
Johannes Lichtman’s debut novel, Such Good Work, was chosen as a 5 Under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation. (Though he is now, sadly, over 35.) His second novel, Calling Ukraine, an “American-expatriate novel for the not-quite-post-colonial age” (Kirkus), a “biting comedy” (Vanity Fair), and “a welcome reminder of the humor and wit that … pervades Ukrainian culture even now” (New York Times), was published in April. His stories and essays have appeared in The Sun, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Oxford American, and he is a regular contributor to Travel + Leisure. He’s taught both creative writing and graduate liberal studies at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, and he just finished a term as the 2022-2023 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at George Washington University. Having previously lived in Sweden, Ukraine, and various American cities, he recently set down roots in DC, where he can be found most Sundays browsing the shelves at Politics & Prose.
REFUND POLICY: Please note that we can issue class refunds up until seven (7) days before the first class session.
