Reading Groups

Reading the Nobel Prize: Han Kang with Elizabeth Howard

6 Sessions Tuesdays, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT January 7 to March 25, 2025

The Center for Fiction

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

Meeting Dates:
1/7, 1/21, 2/4, 2/18, 3/11, 3/25
In Person at The Center for Fiction

Upon announcing that Han Kang was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Committee chairman Anders Olsson commented: “She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.”

Through lyrical, poetic, intimate, and at times uncomfortable images, Kang’s writing forces us to reflect on what it means to be human. To feel grief, pain, loneliness, and fear. To experience political resistance and its ramifications. She shapes her narratives and characters with simplicity, honesty, and even mystery into what is, for readers, a contemplation of the cycle of life.

We will begin our reading with The White Book. In this profound novel, Kang uses the color white to meditate on the death of a child, “something that happened a long time ago.” After, we will read The Vegetarian, first published in Korea in 2007. Written in three parts, this book follows a protagonist who is a graphic artist and homemaker, and whose decision to become a vegetarian, after a Kafkaesque nightmare, leads to many consequences in her life. We will then move on to Human Acts, which revolves around the May 1980 uprising in Gwangju, Korea. How do we feel and respond to political situations? How do they affect our lives?

What to read before the first meeting: Participants should have read through “Snowflakes” in The White Book for the first class. Other assignments for reading will be made during the first session.

What to expect from this reading group: Considering the work in the context of the time and place the stories were written. Considering influences on thought and writing. Thinking about what it means to read a translation.

Reading List:

Capacity: 20

Led by

Elizabeth Howard

Elizabeth Howard

Elizabeth Howard is the producer and host of the Short Fuse Podcast, conversations with artists, writers, musicians, and others whose art reveals our communities through their lens and stirs us to seek change. Her articles related to communication and marketing have appeared in European Communications, Investor Relations, Law Firm Marketing & Profit Report, Communication World, The Strategist, and the New York Law Journal, among others. Her books include Queen Anne’s LaceandWild Blackberry Pie (Thornwillow Press, 2011), A Day with Bonefish Joe (David Godine, 2015), and Ned O’Gorman: A Glance Back (Easton Studio Press, 2016). Howard lives in New York City.

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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