Reading Groups

See It from My Perspective: Exploring the Impact of POV with Sheila Kohler

Six Sessions Mondays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT March 25 to July 1, 2024

Online via Zoom

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The ‘With Books’ option includes all titles required for this group at an additional 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
3/25, 4/8, 4/29, 5/20, 6/10, 7/1
Online via Zoom

We will look at different kinds of narrators and what effect each has on the story.

The first-person-distant narrator: the narrator who comments on the telling of his or her story, who looks on with empathy and wisdom at the lives of the saintly Methodist preacher, Dinah Morris, the young, beautiful Hetty Sorrel, and the tall, strong and impetuous Adam Bede.

The third-person narrator who alights in many different minds from Mrs. Dalloway herself stepping out to buy the flowers for her party to her foil Septimus Warren Smith, who has returned damaged from the war, all contained by a place, London, and a time, one day in June 1923.

The mysterious narrator who we don’t discover until the end of the book in Zadie Smith’s new book, The Fraud.

The “we” narrator, a group of women who come back to their old school for a reunion and reveal the mystery of one of the members of their swim team, Fiamma, who went missing as an adolescent, in the heat and the flat, dun veld of the African countryside.

Students should read the first book of Adam Bede prior to the first meeting.

Reading List:

Adam Bede by George Eliot
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
Cracks by Sheila Kohler

What to expect from this reading group: I will try to introduce the book and point out its value from a writer’s point of view and then open up the discussion, encouraging all who wish to share their thoughts on the text freely.

Led by

Sheila Kohler

Sheila Kohler

Sheila Kohler is the author of eleven novels, three collections of short stories, and a memoir, Once we were sisters. Kohler has been awarded the O. Henry twice; two of her stories have been included in Best American Short Stories; and her story “Miss Martin” was in Best American Mystery Stories 2020. Her work has been translated and published widely abroad. She has taught creative writing at Columbia university, Sarah Lawrence, City College, and at Princeton since 2007. She was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in 2003-4 and a visiting writer at the American Academy of Rome in 2012, 2013, 2015, and 2022. Her novel Cracks has been filmed with Jordan Scott as director and Ridley Scott as executive producer and Eva Green playing Miss G; it is being republished this January with Open Road.

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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