8 sessions, 11:30 AM – 1:30 PM
Tuesdays, September 26 through November 14, 2017
DOC House - Hanover, NH
Course Fee: $80

We are awash in journalistic tales of immigrants and refugees coming to America, and being forced to leave it, but who are these people as individuals? What does it take to make America your new home? How do your customs and politics translate? What does it mean to fit in? We’ll find answers to these questions from three award-winning fiction writers who make it possible to feel like an immigrant.

Jhumpa Lahiri, Robert Olen Butler, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie share views of America through the lives of Indian, Vietnamese, and African immigrants, illuminating the rigors of trying to start a new life – or carry on an old one – in a new country. In Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies we learn what it’s like for a woman to give up an indulged and busy life in Calcutta for an isolated existence as a professor’s wife in an American suburb. In A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Butler, an American with extensive experience in Vietnam, introduces us to immigrants from both North and South Vietnam who have settled in Louisiana. Adiche’s Americanah about a young Nigerian woman making her way in the USA, gives the reader a real sense of what it’s like to be an African immigrant, a far cry from life as an African American.

Short lectures at the beginning of each class will establish context and offer some background on each author, but emphasis will be on discussing how readers respond to an immigrant’s experience. Participants should expect to read about 100 pages a week.