My Account Cart 0 Search form Advanced Search ☰ Menu WRITING ONLINE CLASS: Writing Lyric Essays with A Harp in the Stars (21124) A lyric essay. Sounds intriguing – but what exactly is it? Come explore the more experimental side of the essay by reading – and sketching – flash, segmented, braided, and hermit crab essays. (Hermit crab essays? Yes!) Find out more with Randon Billings Noble, essayist and editor of the new anthology of lyric essays A Harp in the Stars. Four Wednesdays: November 10, 17, (skip 24), and December 1 and 8, from 6 to 8 p.m. ET click here for details FICTION ONLINE CLASS: Philip Roth: The Complicated Legacy of an American Master (21104) In this course, led by a contemporary novelist who was not only influenced by Roth but also met him while learning his craft, we'll explore four major works from Roth's canon--Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint, Sabbath's Theater, and American Pastoral--to analyze the evolution of his style and reckon with his complicated legacy. Six Wednesdays Bi-Weekly: September 22; October 6, 20; November 3, 17; December 1, from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. ET click here for details ONLINE CLASS: Tales From the Perilous Realm: How Tolkien Found His Voice (21108) Join Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger for a deeper look into Tolkien’s Tales From the Perilous Realm. What seems at first glance just playful Middle-earth spinoff has hidden punch that will delight or dismay or bewitch the reader. Or all three. Four Sundays: November 14, 21, (skip 28); and December 5, 12, from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. ET click here for details ONLINE CLASS: The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Nightside of Dickens (21112) No stranger to his doctor’s laudanum in the last months of his life, Charles Dickens’s imagination for the phantasmagoric, his mentality for murder, and his yen for enigma grew in this painful passage, leading the great author to touch pinnacles and crawl to depths he had never reached before. A true reliquary of everything Dickensian, The Mystery of Edwin Drood will be handled with cotton gloves as we pore over the text with scholarly care and a magnifying glass. Four Mondays: November 22, 29; and December 6, 13, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. ET click here for details ONLINE CLASS: France Under Occupation, in Fiction and Nonfiction (2201) Join Janet Hulstrand, a writer who lives in Essoyes, a village in Champagne, for a discussion-based class of four literary works that explore France under Nazi occupation. In addition to the history we’ll learn, we’ll see how storytelling, whether in fiction or nonfiction, can bring to life the drama inherent in the most challenging human experiences—and remind us that although war brings out the worst in some people, it also brings out the best in others. Six Fridays: January 14, 21, February 4, 18, 25, March 4, from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. EST click here for details POETRY ONLINE CLASS: Dante's Purgatorio (2195) For those willing to undertake the steep ascent of Dante’s seven-story Mountain, nowhere in the legacy of human culture is the process of becoming a “whole person” more closely observed or rendered with deeper psychological and social insight than in the cantos of Dante’s Purgatorio. It is certainly possible to read, understand and enjoy Purgatorio without having read the Inferno. Six Tuesdays: October 26; November 2, 9, 16, [23 - no class], 30; and December 7, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. ET Online Class. click here for details NONFICTION ONLINE CLASS: Quintessential Memoir: Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (21113) - New dates Hailed as a masterpiece of 20th century nonfiction, Nabokov's Speak, Memory is as much thought- experiment as memoir, stretching time across language, image, and symbol. In this class, we will be relishing the style and synesthesia of Speak, Memory, lingering over small morsels of prose, travelling from “sun fleck to sun fleck,” as we read for effects and “the awakening of consciousness” in the author, as well as ourselves. Please note new dates: Three Saturdays: January 15, 22, 29, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. ET click here for details HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY ONLINE CLASS: Reading the American Revolutionaries (21125) The revolutionary era produced some of the most important political texts and autobiographies in American history. Join Richard Bell, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, for short and vivid lectures followed by discussion about each work; Ordinary Courage, by Joseph Plumb Martin, Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin, and Common Sense, by Thomas Paine. Three Fridays: December 3, 10, and 17, from 6 to 8 p.m. EST click here for details About Us Sales & Return Policy Contact P&P Employment Opportunities Store Hours and Directions Gift Cards Gift Registries & Wishlists ll titles are subject to availability • Prices subject to change