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This Great Books class is sold out. Please email human@unc.edu with your First & Last name, and phone number to be added to the waitlist. featuring Pamela Cooper, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature   The novel that put Atwood on the literary map The Edible Woman is both a scathingly funny satire of consumerism and a heady exploration of emotional cannibalism. Marked by blazingly surreal humor and a colorful cast of eccentric characters, it is a groundbreaking work of fiction.  —…

This Great Books class is sold out. Please email human@unc.edu with your First & Last name, and phone number to be added to the waitlist. featuring Nadia Yaqub, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies   First writer in Arabic to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature Widely acclaimed as Nobel Prize-winner Mahfouz’s best novel, Midaq Alley brings to life one of the hustling, teeming back alleys of Cairo in the 1940s. No other novel so vividly evokes the sights and sounds of…

This Great Books class is sold out. Please email human@unc.edu with your First & Last name, and phone number to be added to the waitlist. featuring Paul Roberge, Professor of Germanic Languages and Professor of Linguistics   Considered the greatest of the Icelandic sagas Written in the thirteenth century, Njal’s Saga is a story that explores perennial human problems—from failed marriages to divided loyalties, from the law’s inability to curb human passions to the terrible consequences when decent men and…

featuring Kimberly J. Stern, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature Elizabeth Gaskell's rich weave of storytelling and social chronicle remains a landmark North and South is a book about rebellion; it poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Gaskell expertly blends individual feeling with social concern, and her heroine, Margaret Hale, is one of the most original creations of Victorian literature. —Audible.com In our own polarised era of ideological echo chambers, it becomes a story…

This Great Books class is sold out. Please email human@unc.edu with your First & Last name, and phone number to be added to the waitlist. featuring Ray Dooley, Professor of Dramatic Art and Actor, PlayMakers Repertory Company A classic story of loyalty, politics, murder and intrigue with some of the greatest oratory ever written Shakespeare’s cautionary tale about the dangers of upending democracy. —Penguin Random House A gripping historical drama, Julius Caesar contains some of Shakespeare’s most memorable lines and is ranked as…

featuring Marc Cohen, Teaching Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature The first literary addiction memoir Forging a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater seamlessly weaves the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory, and imagination....it paved the way for later generations of literary drug users, from Baudelaire to Burroughs, and anticipated psychoanalysis with its insights into the subconscious. —Penguin Random House Confessions of an English Opium-Eater remains its author’s most famous and…

featuring Chloe M. Hill, Teaching Assistant Professor of Portuguese The devastating final work by Brazil's greatest modern writer Every page vibrates with feeling. It’s not enough to say that Lispector bends language or uses words in new ways. Plenty of modernists do that. No one else writes prose this rich. —National Public Radio Clarice Lispector is the premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century. She is studied by the scholars, but has never managed to reach the reading…

This Great Books class is sold out. Please email human@unc.edu with your First & Last name, and phone number to be added to the waitlist. featuring James J. O'Hara, George L. Paddison Professor of Classics The epic poem that changed the course of human thought forever This great poem stands with Virgil's Aeneid as one of the vital and enduring achievements of Latin literature. Lost for more than a thousand years, its return to circulation in 1417 reintroduced dangerous ideas about the nature…

This Great Books class is sold out. Please email human@unc.edu with your First & Last name, and phone number to be added to the waitlist. featuring James J. O'Hara, George L. Paddison Professor of Classics The epic poem that changed the course of human thought forever This great poem stands with Virgil's Aeneid as one of the vital and enduring achievements of Latin literature. Lost for more than a thousand years, its return to circulation in 1417 reintroduced dangerous ideas about the nature…

This Great Books class is sold out. Please email human@unc.edu with your First & Last name, and phone number to be added to the waitlist. featuring Gabriel Trop, Associate Professor of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literature More than any other modern writer in world literature, Kafka captures the loneliness and misery that fill the lives of 20th-century humanity Franz Kafka’s imagination so far outstripped the forms and conventions of the literary tradition he inherited that he was forced to turn that tradition…

This Great Books class is sold out. Please email human@unc.edu with your First & Last name, and phone number to be added to the waitlist. featuring Gabriel Trop, Associate Professor of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literature More than any other modern writer in world literature, Kafka captures the loneliness and misery that fill the lives of 20th-century humanity Franz Kafka’s imagination so far outstripped the forms and conventions of the literary tradition he inherited that he was forced to turn that tradition…

This Great Books class is sold out. Please email human@unc.edu with your First & Last name, and phone number to be added to the waitlist. featuring Lloyd Kramer, Professor of History and Director, Carolina Public Humanities Winner of the 2016 Frederic W. Ness Book Award sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities An elegant and informative survey of the work of important thinkers. —Inside Higher Ed High school counselors ask students their career goals when they guide their college choices. In…

This Great Books class is sold out. Please email human@unc.edu with your First & Last name, and phone number to be added to the waitlist. featuring Lloyd Kramer, Professor of History and Director, Carolina Public Humanities Winner of the 2016 Frederic W. Ness Book Award sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities An elegant and informative survey of the work of important thinkers. —Inside Higher Ed High school counselors ask students their career goals when they guide their college choices. In…

featuring Danielle Christmas, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature TIME Magazine's Best Non-fiction Book of 2018 NPR's Book Concierge Best Book of 2018 New York Public Library's Best Book of 2018 —Written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all,…

featuring Danielle Christmas, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature TIME Magazine's Best Non-fiction Book of 2018 NPR's Book Concierge Best Book of 2018 New York Public Library's Best Book of 2018 —Written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all,…

This Great Books class is sold out. Please email human@unc.edu with your First & Last name, and phone number to be added to the waitlist. featuring Hilary Edwards Lithgow, Teaching Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature Some of the most powerful and pleasing poems in the English language, written in one of the greatest periods in English poetry On Wordsworth: William Wordsworth is the foremost of the English Romantic poets. He was much influenced by the events of the French Revolution in…

This Great Books class is sold out. Please email human@unc.edu with your First & Last name, and phone number to be added to the waitlist. featuring Rachel Gurvich, Clinical Associate Professor of Law Her most maturely written novel, showing a refinement of literary conception —A brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, Persuasion is, above all, a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities. —Thomas Nelson Publishers —Jane Austen's last completed novel and her most optimistic and romantic work, Persuasion gives full…

This Great Books class is sold out. Please email human@unc.edu with your First & Last name, and phone number to be added to the waitlist. featuring Rachel Gurvich, Clinical Associate Professor of Law Her most maturely written novel, showing a refinement of literary conception —A brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, Persuasion is, above all, a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities. —Thomas Nelson Publishers —Jane Austen's last completed novel and her most optimistic and romantic work, Persuasion gives full…

**This Great Books class will be held virtually over Zoom** featuring Eliza Rose, Assistant Professor of Central European Studies   Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature —A winding, imaginative, genre-defying story. Part murder mystery, part fairy tale, Drive Your Plow is a thrilling philosophical examination of the ways in which some living creatures are privileged above others. —TIME —Drive Your Plow is exhilarating in a way that feels fierce and private, almost inarticulable; it’s one of the most existentially refreshing…

**This Great Books class will be held virtually over Zoom** featuring I. Jonathan Kief, Assistant Professor of Korean Studies   The bestselling novel that triggered a fierce sexism battle in South Korea —A global sensation, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 has become both a touchstone for a conversation around feminism and gender and a lightning rod for anti-feminists who view the book as inciting misandry. —The Guardian —This novel is about the banality of the evil that is systemic misogyny....Jiyoung, like Gregor…

**This Great Books class will be held virtually over Zoom** featuring I. Jonathan Kief, Assistant Professor of Korean Studies   The bestselling novel that triggered a fierce sexism battle in South Korea —A global sensation, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 has become both a touchstone for a conversation around feminism and gender and a lightning rod for anti-feminists who view the book as inciting misandry. —The Guardian —This novel is about the banality of the evil that is systemic misogyny....Jiyoung, like Gregor…

**This Great Books class will be held virtually over Zoom** featuring Marc Cohen, Teaching Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature   Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography —Nine Continents presents a fascinating portrait of China in the 80s and 90s, how the Cultural Revolution shaped families, and how the country's economic ambitions gave rise to great change. —Audible.com —Guo is a bolder, angrier and more ambitious figure than her forebears. —The Times (UK) —Vivid—and funny....Nine Continents shows…

**This Great Books class will be held virtually over Zoom** featuring Marc Cohen, Teaching Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature   Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography —Nine Continents presents a fascinating portrait of China in the 80s and 90s, how the Cultural Revolution shaped families, and how the country's economic ambitions gave rise to great change. —Audible.com —Guo is a bolder, angrier and more ambitious figure than her forebears. —The Times (UK) —Vivid—and funny....Nine Continents shows…

**This Great Books class will be held virtually over Zoom** featuring Lauren Jarvis, Assistant Professor of History   A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee —Waiting for the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee’s third novel, which won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize, is an allegory of the war between oppressor and oppressed. —Penguin Books —"J.M. Coetzee’s vison goes to the nerve-center of being. What he finds there is more than most people will ever know about themselves, and he conveys…

**This Great Books class will be held virtually over Zoom** featuring Lauren Jarvis, Assistant Professor of History   A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee —Waiting for the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee’s third novel, which won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize, is an allegory of the war between oppressor and oppressed. —Penguin Books —"J.M. Coetzee’s vison goes to the nerve-center of being. What he finds there is more than most people will ever know about themselves, and he conveys…

**This Great Books class will be held virtually over Zoom** featuring Hilary Edwards Lithgow, Teaching Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature   The first Irish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature —W. B. Yeats was not only Ireland's greatest poet but one of the most influential voices in world literature in the twentieth century. His extraordinary work, in the words of Seamus Heaney, encourages us "to be more resolutely and abundantly alive, whatever the conditions." —Faber & Faber…

**This Great Books class will be held virtually over Zoom** featuring Henry Veggian, Teaching Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature   Winner of the Strega Prize, Italy's most prestigious literary award —A deeply affecting tale of childhood disenchantment, Arturo's Island is a work of stunning emotional force by one of modern Italian literature's foremost writers. —Amazon.com —By turns devastating and otherworldly, Morante's novel is a classic, and Goldstein's new translation should return to it the attention it deserves. —Kirkus Reviews —The characters…

**This Great Books class will be held virtually over Zoom** featuring Henry Veggian, Teaching Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature   Winner of the Strega Prize, Italy's most prestigious literary award —A deeply affecting tale of childhood disenchantment, Arturo's Island is a work of stunning emotional force by one of modern Italian literature's foremost writers. —Amazon.com —By turns devastating and otherworldly, Morante's novel is a classic, and Goldstein's new translation should return to it the attention it deserves. —Kirkus Reviews —The characters…

**This Great Books class will be held virtually over Zoom** featuring Joseph Fletcher, Teaching Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature   One of the best-known and best-loved poems in the English language —Coleridge is a master of mellifluous poetic phrasing—hypnotic and incantatory—and uses it deftly to weave a spellbinding tale of sin and redemption.—Audible.com —One of the great narrative poems in English, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is admired for its fluid meter and masterly structure, accurate observation…

**This Great Books class will be held virtually over Zoom** featuring Eliza Rose, Assistant Professor and Laszlo Birinyi Sr Fellow in Central European Studies   Winner of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development 2022 Literature Award —If every war needs its master chronicler, Ukraine has Serhiy Zhadan, one of Europe’s most promising novelists. Written with a raw intensity, this is a deeply personal account of violence that will be remembered as the definitive novel of the war in Ukraine.—Yale…