Reading Groups

Vast Expanses: Time and Space in the Southern Hemisphere and Beyond with Sam Rutter

4 Sessions Wednesdays, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT April 9 to June 11, 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:
4/9, 4/30, 5/28, 6/11
In Person at The Center for Fiction

The so-called “New World” promised wide open spaces and a chance to start over for the settlers, explorers, and marauders who arrived in lands already ripe with cultures as old as time. In these four short novels, which take surprising, allegorical, and indirect approaches to Australia’s outback, South Africa’s veld, Argentina’s pampas, and Earth’s orbit, we’ll explore what a clash of cultures, the layering of timelines, and the effect of distance and isolation can do to the human spirit.

Session 1: The Plains by Gerald Murnane
On their vast estates, the landowning families of the plains have preserved a rich and distinctive culture. Obsessed with their own habitat and history, they hire artisans, writers, and historians to record in minute detail every aspect of their lives, and the nature of their land. A young filmmaker arrives on the plains, hoping to make his own contribution to the elaboration of this history. In a private library, he begins to take notes for a film and chooses the daughter of his patron for a leading role. Twenty years later, he begins to tell his haunting story of life on the plains.

Session 2: Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Waiting for the Barbarians, Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s third novel, is an allegory of the war between oppressor and oppressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that elevate their own survival above justice and decency.

Session 3: The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (translated by Iona Macintryre & Fiona Mackintosh)
Cámara, Gabriela Cabezón’s subversive retelling of Argentina’s foundational gaucho epic Martín Fierro, is a celebration of the color and movement of the living world, the open road, love and sex, and the dream of lasting freedom. With humor and sophistication, this joyful, hallucinatory novel offers an incisive critique of national myths.

Session 4: Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below.

Join us at The Center for Fiction to discuss these four prize-winning novels. No prior knowledge is assumed. Please read each novel before our sessions and come ready for discussion.

What to read in advance of the first meeting:Please read The Plains in advance of the first meeting.

What to expect from this reading group: Rather than a lecture or a graduate seminar, this is a reader-driven group – I’ll be here to facilitate a conversation. Everyone is encouraged to bring questions and share comments.

Reading List:

The Plains by Gerald Murnane
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Capacity: 20

Led by

Samuel Rutter

Samuel Rutter

Samuel Rutter is a writer and translator from Melbourne, Australia. His work can be found in the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Harper’s, among other places, and he has translated several novels from the French and the Spanish. He is the editor-in-chief of Amulet magazine.

About this series

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