Thank you to everyone who joined Sunday's discussion of Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi (translated by Marilyn Booth). We found much to explore in this celebrated novel, which won the Man Booker International Prize and is the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English.
Links for Further Exploration
Video of a discussion with Jokha Alharthi at the 2020 Jaipur Literary Festival
"Living Many Lives Through Her Pen: Jokha Alharthi’s Literary Journey" - The Daily Q
Folio of the story of Laila and Manjun, a story referenced in the novel, at The Met
Article "The Novels of Jokha Alharthi: Bringing Communities and Women Out of Hiding" - The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Oman: Country Profile - BBC
"Religion and History: The Cultural Spectrum of Oman" - Culture Trip
January Discussion
We will kick off 2022 with a discussion on Sunday, January 23, of In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova. With the rise of the new variant, we will continue to meet online for the time being.
About the book: "Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice." (more)
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