Martin Schneider writes:
Zadie Smith is teaching a weekly fiction seminar at Columbia University this semester under the title “Sense and Sensibility.”
A local bookstore called Book Culture, which I believe for years was called Labyrinth, has posted 10 of the 15 books that Smith is assigning her charges. Here they are:
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
Catholics, Brian Moore
The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka
Crash, J.G. Ballard
An Experiment in Love, Hilary Mantel
Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, David Lodge
The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
My Loose Thread, Dennis Cooper
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
The Loser, Thomas Bernhard
The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow
A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
Reader’s Block, David Markson
Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
The Quiet American, Graham Greene
Pretty good list! I see she hit favorites of Benjamin (Spark), Jonathan (Bernhard), and myself (Wallace). I wonder what the other five are? If you’re taking the course and happen to see this, drop us a line!
Addendum: Book Culture has now come through with the full list. Thanks very much!