Friday, April 15, 2011

Book Club for Writers: Nabokov and Borges

The library will hold its third Book Club for Writers on Thursday, April 21 at 7:00 PM. The discussion will focus on stories by two twentieth-century masters: "Signs and Symbols" by Vladimir Nabokov and "The Library of Bable" by Jorge Luis Borges. The discussion is free and open to the public, and copies of the stories are available from the library.

Book Club for Writers examines classic and contemporary works of fiction with a focus on craft and technique that will particularly interest writers and aspiring writers. The program was created by the New Hampshire Writers' Project and is sponsored locally by a fiction writing group that meets weekly at the Haverhill Corner Library.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Huckleberry Finn Book Discussion

The library will sponsor a discussion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain on Monday, April 18, at 7:00 PM. This is the fourth and final in a series of discussions of classic American fiction that the library has sponsored this winter. Published in 1885, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been one of the most popular, and one of the most controversial, novels ever published in America. Ernest Hemingway declared, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn' . . . It's the best book we've had." Yet when it was published, the public library in Concord, Massachusetts (home of the Transcendentalist Movement) banned the book, declaring it "the veriest trash," while during the 1990s, the American Library Association ranked it the fifth most frequently challenged book in the country. (In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it has slipped to number fourteen.) Come join the discussion and see what the fuss is about.