One Tuesday: November 27, 7 to 9 p.m.
Barbara Kingsolver—author of fourteen books, recipient of numerous prestigious literary awards and nominations, and benefactor of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction—returns after a six-year hiatus from fiction with a riveting story of two families who live in the same house in two different centuries, the 19th and our own, each navigating historic paradigm shifts amid major cultural and economic upheaval, or, as Kingsolver puts it, “both coping in the brave, sweet, ridiculous ways people try to deal with a world that’s falling apart.”
As summarized by Kingsolver’s publisher: Willa Knox finds herself in middle age with nothing to show for her lifetime of hard work but a stack of unpaid bills, sudden job loss, dependent adult children and their cantankerous grandfather, and an inherited brick home in Vineland, New Jersey, that is literally falling apart. In desperation, Willa decides to research the history of her house, hoping that the local historical preservation society might take an interest, and provide funding for its sorely needed repairs. While researching Vineland’s creation as a Utopian colony in the 19th century, Willa uncovers a kindred spirit, Thatcher Greenwood, a science teacher with a lifelong passion for honest investigation. Thatcher finds himself under siege in his community and threatened by his employer for his championing of Charles Darwin’s exciting new theory of evolution, and his friendships with a brilliant woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor draw him further into conflict, leading to a dangerous vendetta with the town’s most powerful men.
Unsheltered is a novel for our times; peopled by the vivid, unforgettable characters we have come to relish in the works of this master storyteller, and engaged with urgent social issues, it asks an essential question: Where and how and with whom do we find shelter in our troubled times from the storms of history and an “impossible-looking future”?
Required Book:
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver (9780062684561)
Recommended Further Reading:
By Barbara Kingsolver:
Flight Behavior (2012) (9780062124271)
The Lacuna (2009) (9780060852580)
The Poisonwood Bible (1998) (9780060786502)
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), with Stephen L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver (9780060852566)
Rhonda Shary was an adjunct professor of English in New York for over ten years, teaching writing, literature, and film at SUNY New Paltz, Marymount College of Fordham University, and New York Institute of Technology. Her poetry, fiction, and essays appear in P&P’s District Lines III and V; 100-Word Story; Water Writes: An Anthology in Honor of the Hudson River Quadricentennial; A Slant of Light: Women Writers of the Hudson River Valley; and The Shawangunk Review, among others. After moving to DC in 2014, she joined the staff at Politics and Prose Bookstore, where she is now an editor for OPUS Publishing and an instructor in the literature and writing classes.
REFUND POLICY: Please note that we can issue class refunds up until seven (7) days before the first class session.