Summer of Money, Sex

This summer we will take a hiatus from the Great Conversations I anthology and explore both classic and contemporary writings on the themes of money and sex found in the "Vital Ideas" anthologies recently published as handsome paperbacks by the Great Books Foundation.  Meetings take place at 7 p.m. on July 23rd and August 27th at the Main Library.  Discussion questions will be posted on this blog approximately one week before we meet.

“Money” has short fictional and nonfictional writings by Harriet Jacobs, an American freed slave, Henry David Thoreau, Karl Marx, Theodore Dreiser, African-American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston,  John Cheever, social commentator Barbara Ehrenreich, marketing consultant Paco Underhill, Amy Tan, and poet Katy Lederer. “Listening to them, we might just make sense out of that complicated concept we call money,” writes the book’s co-editor Dana Heller.

“Vital Ideas: Sex” comprises writings from the Book of Samuel, John Donne, Andrew Marvel, Sigmund Freud, Fay Weldon, Margaret Atwood, Billy Collins, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Mark Doty, Susan Minot, Louann Brizenine, Mona Simpson, and Nathan Englander.  In the words of editor Regina Barreca, we hear from these authors “the perspectives of those who have dared to think about sex rather than chortle or blush.”