Flyleaf Books

featuring Jessica Tanner, Assistant Professor of French Meeting Dates: Wednesdays, March 6 and 13 "The paradoxes of great literature are those of human nature, and Colette is nothing if not human...Accessible and elusive; greedy and austere; courageous and timid; subversive and complacent; scorchingly honest and sublimely mendacious; an inspired consoler and an existential pessimist--these are the qualities of the artist and the woman."—from the Introduction "A delicate and humorous realist, Colette was the annalist of female existence...Her greatest strength as a…

featuring Jessica Tanner, Assistant Professor of French Meeting Dates: Wednesdays, March 6 and 13 "The paradoxes of great literature are those of human nature, and Colette is nothing if not human...Accessible and elusive; greedy and austere; courageous and timid; subversive and complacent; scorchingly honest and sublimely mendacious; an inspired consoler and an existential pessimist--these are the qualities of the artist and the woman."—from the Introduction "A delicate and humorous realist, Colette was the annalist of female existence...Her greatest strength as a…

featuring Christina M. Weiler, Teaching Assistant Professor of German Meeting Dates: Wednesday, March 20 "One of the most important works in the history of musical theater."—History.com "Based on John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill's unforgettable music - one of the earliest and most successful attempts to…

featuring Maggie Fritz-Morkin, Assistant Professor of Italian Meeting Date: Wednesday, March 27 "Placed in a convent at the age of thirteen, Virginia Galilei, Galileo’s eldest daughter, wrote to her father continually. Now Dava Sobel has translated into English all 124 surviving letters that Virginia (renamed Suor Maria Celeste at the convent) wrote to Galileo. The letters span a dramatic decade that included the Thirty Years’ War, the bubonic plague, and the development of Galileo’s own universe-changing discoveries. Suor Maria Celeste’s letters…

featuring Marc Cohen, Teaching Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature Meeting Dates: Tuesdays, April 2 and 9 "A beautiful novel...quietly breathtaking...Sebald contrives not to offer an ordinary, straightforward recital. For what is so delicate is how Sebald makes Austerlitz’s story a broken, recessed enigma whose meaning the reader must impossibly rescue."—from the Introduction "Sebald is a rare and elusive species...but still, he is an easy read, just as Kafka is...He is an addiction, and once buttonholed by his books, you…

featuring Marc Cohen, Teaching Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature Meeting Dates: Tuesdays, April 2 and 9 "A beautiful novel...quietly breathtaking...Sebald contrives not to offer an ordinary, straightforward recital. For what is so delicate is how Sebald makes Austerlitz’s story a broken, recessed enigma whose meaning the reader must impossibly rescue."—from the Introduction "Sebald is a rare and elusive species...but still, he is an easy read, just as Kafka is...He is an addiction, and once buttonholed by his books, you…

featuring Radislav Lapushin, Associate Professor of Russian Literature Meeting Dates: Tuesdays, April 16 and 23 "The great 19th-century Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov wrote nearly one thousand stories, a body of work that is unmatched in its alchemy of sensitivity, wisdom, precision, verve, soulfulness, and economy. Chekhov’s sensibility was radically human and thoroughly modern: write not how you think things should be, but rather as they are. Universally recognized as one of the greatest short story writers of all time,…