Vikram Chandra has won many awards and critical acclaim for his novels and short stories. The best selling Sacred Games was published in 2007. Born in New Dehli, he now teaches creative writing at Berkeley. He reads from his most recent novel to an audience at UC Berkeley. (57 minutes)
Li is author of 'A Thousand Years of Good Prayers' and 'The Vagrants.' A Beijing native and graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has received numerous awards. She reads and speaks at UC Berkeley. (54 minutes)
Named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, ZZ Packer has received a Commonwealth Club Fiction Award, Wallace Stegner and Guggenheim Fellowships, and a Whiting Award. Her acclaimed 2003 collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere features eight stories whose subjects range from Girl Scouts to expatriates in Japan. Originally from Chicago, Packer is currently writing a novel set in the post-Civil War period. (55 minutes)
What has been said of Moby-Dick—that it’s the greatest novel no one ever reads—could just as well be said of any number of American “classics” like The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This course reconsiders a small number of nineteenth-century American novels by presenting each in a surprising context.
This seminar looks at two bestselling nineteenth-century American authors whose works made the subject of slavery popular among mainstream readers. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain have subsequently become canonized and reviled, embraced and banned by individuals and groups at both ends of the political and cultural spectrum and everywhere in between.
Catherine Brown, Lecturer in English Literature, compares West Indian writers Derek Walcott and Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul on their attitudes towards history and myth. This podcast is part of the Literature, Art and Oxford series from Oxford University.