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Reading Groups

Moby-Dick with Sheridan Hay (Sold Out)

$240

8 Sessions

Out of stock

Once a week Mondays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT September 14 to November 2, 2020

This reading group has reached its capacity. To join the waitlist, please email Allison Escoto at [email protected].


Last year marked the bicentennial of the birth of Herman Melville, celebrated for his novel, Moby-Dick—one of the finest works of imagination in the history of literature. What’s that? You never read it? You started it but didn’t finish? Moby-Dick is the greatest novel still waiting to be read. Now is your chance.

In the company of supportive companions, a crew of fellow readers, the book’s tremendous expansiveness opens out to become not only a novel about a quest, a voyage of the soul, although it is that. It becomes not only a novel about the maniacal dictates of one man over a diverse crew of men from the world over, although it is that too. Not only a novel about race, democracy, faith and the loss of faith. About America’s past and her corrupted present or about the rapacious and willful destruction of Nature by men. About the invisible world hidden within the visible one—although the novel contains all these things . . .

In our fraught present moment, Moby-Dick remains as current and pertinent as ever. Melville’s great accomplishment must be met with the determination to see his quest through to the end. It is the voyage we’re all on. Sign up here. “I think ye do look brave.”

For the first session please skip the Extracts and begin at Chapter One, “Loomings” (page 3) and read up to Chapter 20, “All Astir” (page 104). 


This group will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the first session.

Moby Dick

Led by

  • Sheridan Hay Photo

    Sheridan Hay

    Sheridan Hay

    Sheridan Hay holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first novel, The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday/Anchor), which features a lost novel by Herman Melville, was a Booksense Pick, a Barnes and Noble Discover selection, shortlisted for the Border’s Original Voices Fiction Prize, and nominated for the International Impac Award. A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, foreign rights have been sold in fourteen countries. Sheridan has led the Center’s Moby-Dick reading group many times, as well as leading a popular Henry James group which will meet again in October.