SWW Essential Reading List – The Classics
This list evolved from a post on Facebook where I asked SWW members for essential reading suggestions.
Below is a tentative list of those suggestions, minus non-fiction. Please continue making suggestions. Some of these books on the list are probably too recent to be ‘classics’. An essential ‘modern’ reading will come later.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Addams
Little Women, LM Alcott
Illusions, Richard Bach
Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach
Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano
Death of the Heart At Swim-Two-Birds, Elizabeth Bowen
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
Something Wicked this Way Comes, Ray Bradbury
Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Heart of a Dog, Mikhail Bulgakov
Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
The Plague, Albert Camus
The Stranger, Albert Camus
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
The Alchemist, Paolo Coehlo
Underworld, Don DeLillo
White Noise, Don DeLillo
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The World as I Found It, Bruce Duffy
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Four Quartets / The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Howard’s End, EM Forster
Of Human Bondage, EM Forster
The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass
Hunger, Knut Hamsun
Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
The Odyssey, Homer
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Brave New World, Aldus Huxley
The World According to Garp, John Irving
Ulysses, James Joyce
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundra
Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
The Golden Notebook, Doris May Lessing
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Billy Budd: Sailor, Herman Melville
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Paradise Lost, John Milton
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor
1984, George Orwell
Manhattan Transfer; Dos Passos, John Roderigo
USA Trilogy, Dos Passos
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz
The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
Jewel in the Crown, Paul Scott
The Works of Shakespeare
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; Laurence Sterne
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Dylan Thomas
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Native Son, Richard Wright
2011 Holiday Party
Come join Seoul Writers Workshop for our end of year holiday party!
We’ll have a late lunch at The Alley with some good food and nice conversation and maybe play some party games. Then we’ll do readings from our Holiday Flash Fiction/Poetry Contest and vote for the winner.
Finally, let’s do a book swap. Bring a few of your best, no-longer-needed books to the party and trade them for something you haven’t read yet.
The Contest:
Write an original piece of fiction or poetry on the theme of The Holidays or the End of the Year. Bring your piece to the party and read it to the attendees. We’ll vote for winner after all the pieces have been read.
For fiction, 600 words or less.
For poetry, should be under 3 minutes in spoken length.
Please RSVP by Friday so we can adjust the booking if necessary. If you say yes, we expect to see you!
RSVP here: https://www.facebook.com/events/229770793758220/
“Out of Place” Events
The official launch is on Sunday, November 20th, 3pm at Berlin. http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=292705980758669
This will be a great chance for you to meet other writers and read some of your work – either from Out of Place or something else you’ve written. We’ll have food and a raffle with the proceeds benefiting the House of Sharing.
Immediately following the official launch will be the 2nd AXIS live storytelling event. In the same vein as The Moth and RISK!, AXIS features people telling true stories from their lives, without notes, centered on a theme; this month’s theme is ‘Turning Points’.
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=280079755358813
We will also be co-hosting Lyrically Minded, a night of poetry and spoken word craziness at the Orange Tree on Saturday, November 19th. If you would like to take a turn at the mic, or meet some other spoken word fanatics, come join us at 8pm.
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=287583431264335
Anthology Covers
Which do you prefer: 1) temple fish 2) tea farm umbrella 3) backlit forest 4) rainbow pig?
Workshop Calendar for the Rest of 2011
September 4th – Workshop
September 25th – Poetry Workshop
October 23rd – Poetry & Lyrics Workshop
November 1st – National Novel Writing Month Kick-off
November 12th – Workshop
November 19th – Poetry Night with ‘Lyrically Minded’ and Pre-launch Party @ Orange Tree
November 20th - Seoul Writers Workshop 2012 Anthology “Out of Place” Launch Party @ Berlin
November 26th – Workshop
November 27th – Poetry & Lyrics Workshop
December 10th – Workshop
December 17th – Christmas Party (date tentative)
August Calendar
August 7th: workshop at Page A cafe near Hapjeong Station
August 20th: workshop
August 21st: poetry workshop at Cafe Dal Komm in Gangnam
“Out of Place” Cover Art Contest
The theme of the 2011 anthology is “Out of Place” and we need an image for the cover. This is a great chance to flex your creative muscles and contribute to SWW’s 4th annual project. Interpret the theme however you like; be as subtle or obvious as you want.
Some things to keep in mind: SWW’s anthologies are standard trade paperback size, approximately 198 x 129. In the past we’ve had different, related images on the front and back covers, and also 1 continuous image that wraps around the spine.
Images should be original works by you. Files should be 200-300dpi and in jpg or other common file format. Email your submission seoulwriters@gmail.com by July 20th, 2011. Winners will receive 2 copies of the 2011 Seoul Writers Workshop Anthology “Out of Place” and a gift certificate to a local shop or restaurant. You grant Seoul Writers Workshop a one-time publication right for the image for use on 2011 anthology publication and print-on-demand or electronic formats of the 2011 anthology and related advertisements. The artist retains all other rights to the image.
June Events
June 5th: Workshop
June 11th-12th: Writers’ Retreat in Gapyeong/Nami Island
June 24th: Call for Submissions deadline
June 25th: Workshop
June 26th: Poetry Workshop
Writers’ Retreat
Now is a great time to get out of the city and refocus our creative energies. Seoul Writers is heading to beautiful Gapyeong and Nami Island on June 11th and staying the night in a nearby pension. It should be a great experience, whether you just spend the day with us or stay overnight.
