Join us here at Wired for Books as we read and discuss the fiction of Raymond Carver, Zora Neale Hurston, Leo Tolstoy and Toni Morrison. The theme for our online book discussion group this time is "community reconsidered." You can get started here with Robert Coles' essay, Stories and Living a Life.

We're talking about the short stories in Raymond Carver's anthology, Where I'm Calling From and Zora Neale Hurston's classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, two of Tolstoy's short stories, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Master and Man and Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye.

Our hosts, professors of literature at Ohio University, Marilyn Atlas and Edgar Whan, were joined in the studios of Ohio University Public Radio with special guest scholars to record four radio programs to begin  the project.

You can listen to these shows in RealAudio or read the transcripts.

Here you can download a free RealPlayer, a program that works with Netscape or Internet Explorer. You'll need this and a sound card and speakers to listen to the RealAudio programs.

Listen to Marilyn and Edgar with special guest scholars, Daniel Born, Annette Oxindine, Peter Heidtmann, and Vattel Rose as they discuss the works of Raymond Carver, Zora Neale Hurston, Leo Tolstoy and Toni Morrison.

If you'd rather read the transcripts the old-fashioned way, they are available here: Carver transcripts, Hurston transcripts, Tolstoy transcripts, and Morrison transcripts.

We want to know what you think! Go to our discussion area and add your ideas about the books. You can also read what others have to say about the readings.  

Edgar and Marilyn returned to the studio to record four more programs based on your comments.  Here they are in RealAudio: Carver q&a, Hurston q&a, Tolstoy q&a, and Morrison q&a.

To read the comments in chronological order and find other Web resources about the authors, go to these resource pages for More Carver, More Hurston, More Tolstoy, and More Morrison.

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Excerpted from Ohio Humanities Council
"Community Reconsidered":

"Some of us settle in one place for a long time. We make commitments to people, we agree upon a way of doing things. Most of us, though, don't live in one place anymore. When we do 'settle down,' we often find that our bonds to family, friends, and neighbors are less secure. Does our pursuit of individual interests weaken these bonds? Are we less concerned about a common good?"

"People who study American culture have noted that we are losing confidence in the institutions that used to bind us together - the local school, government, the place where we worship. Are we beginning to question the traditions and values which have made our shared life possible?"

"In the essay for the series, Stories and Living a Life, Robert Coles reveals how people learn from suffering and loss which can call into question the way they relate to others. The struggles of characters in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston awaken our moral imagination, our compassion."

"To 'live a life' for Coles means to come to understand our nature, our responsibilities to ourselves and others. Like the people in the stories, we, the readers, may at first refuse to see ourselves or our ties to those around us. But in sympathy with the suffering of these characters, we learn to reach out - to live our own lives."

Wired for Books is produced by the
Ohio University Telecommunications Center

For RealAudio or RealVideo, you'll need the RealPlayer.
You can download a free player at Real Networks.

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This project was funded, in part, by a grant from the
Ohio Humanities Council
and the
National Endowment for the Humanities.

Wired for Books: Community Reconsidered is also made possible, in part,
by the following underwriters:

Vintage Books,
America's leading publisher of quality paperback books and the main supplier of free reading group guides to bookstores and libraries.

For free Vintage Guides, go to www.randomhouse.com/vintage/read/

Athens Book Center,
serving all of southeastern Ohio
with book ordering and free shipping in southeastern Ohio
at 1-800-592-4865 (Ohio) or 1-740-592-4865
and on the World Wide Web at
www.athensbookcenter.com

And special thanks to
Athens County Library Services
and the
State Library of Ohio
for providing books to our Ohio readers and scholars.

© Copyright 1999 Ohio University