Hot Off the Press Spring 2022
Join the new session, launching February 22, 2022!
If you love a book conversation that’s lively and engaging, where we talk about the book thoroughly and thoughtfully, then this class is for you. Led by long-time teacher and publishing professional Lynn Rosen, this class tackles brand new literary fiction.
Class conversations include analysis of the book as well as background information provided by Lynn about the author and the book’s path to publication. We talk serious book talk, but have a lot of laughs too!
The Spring 2022 session of HOTP includes five class meetings in which we will be reading new books by favorite authors, debut authors, and prize winning fiction.
CLASS DATES/TIME:
Class meets virtually via Zoom on Tuesday evenings from 7pm EST to 8:30pm EST on:
February 22
March 22
April 19
May 17
June 14
CLASS COST & LOGISTICS:
LOCATION: via Zoom; link to be provided to participants.
COST: $200
Books are not included in the cost.
Email lynn@lynnrosen.com to register. Payment can be made by check or Venmo.
Special Offer: If you’re new to the program and want to try out a class, contact lynn@lynnrosen.com and we’ll arrange that for you.
CLASS READING SCHEDULE:
February 22
The Promise by Damon Galgut
Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize
A modern family saga from South Africa. Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.
Reunited by four funerals over three decades, the dwindling family reflects the atmosphere of its country—an atmosphere of resentment, renewal, and, ultimately, hope. The Promise is an epic drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of national history.
March 22
Hell of a Book by Jason Mott
Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction
In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and urgent: since Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.
As these characters’ stories build and build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America.
April 19
Selection to be announced.
May 17
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
From one of the most celebrated writers of our time, a literary figure with cult status, a “sibling novel” to her Pulitzer Prize- and NBCC Award-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad—an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity and meaning in a world where memories and identities are no longer private.
The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.” Bix is 40, with four kids, restless, desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. It’s 2010. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, “Own Your Unconscious”—that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.
In spellbinding interlocking narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades.
June 14
Selection to be announced.
