[2014-06-04] Fucking A

This Wednesday, we met to discuss a controversial play Fucking A (2000) by Suzan-Lori Parks who decided to claim Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel: “I’m going to write a play, a riff on The Scarlet Letter, and I’m going to call it Fucking A! Ha, ha, ha!” * At that time, Parks was joking, as she hadn’t read the novel. Nevertheless, this idea was preying on her mind for a very long time and, finally, the play saw the light of day.

Suzan-Lori Parks (1963 - )

Suzan-Lori Parks, an African-American playwright and screenwriter, was born on 10^th May 1963 in Fort Knox, Kentucky into a military family. As a child, she developed a taste for folklore, mythology as well as wrote numerous short stories and songs.

[07-05-2014] HOME

This Wednesday we met to discuss Home (2012) – Toni Morrison’s latest novel or, rather, a longer novella since some of us complained that it was too short. On barely 145 pages, the author includes concisely such themes as race, masculinity, color(blindness), love, politics, property, violence, dysfunctional family and history/memory. Although we were all enchanted by the narrative and language, some critics find fault with our beloved (!) writer.

[2014-03-19] Cosmopolis

This Wednesday we met to discuss Cosmopolis (2003) – a novel by Don DeLillo. Our discussion revolved around the following questions: how to approach this piece of literature? What is the message for its reader? The novel undoubtedly escapes any rigid classification.

Don DeLillo (1936 - )

Don DeLillo was born in 1936 and was raised in a working class Italian Catholic family in New York City in the Bronx district. As a teenager, he read such authors as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. DeLillo’s writing style was further shaped by jazz music (Miles Davis, Coltrane) and cinema (Antonioni, Truffaut, Kubrick, Scorsese, Coppola and Altman). He affirms: "European and Asian cinemas of the 1960s shaped the way I think and feel about things. […] Perhaps, in an indirect way, cinema allowed me to become a writer."