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Adult Education
Designed for lifelong learners with busy schedules and inquiring minds, the Newberry’s Adult Education Classes dive into the humanities from fresh perspectives. Explore your creative or intellectual pursuits in literature, music, history, philosophy, religion, language, genealogy, or creative writing. Taught by experts in their fields, each class fosters conversation, creativity, and an open exchange of knowledge.
We offer nearly 150 classes annually, ranging in size, duration, cost, and format and held over three terms (Fall, Winter/Spring, and Summer).
Written between 1920 and 1937, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was at the height of his creative powers, these ten lyric tales represent some of the author's finest fiction. In them, Fitzgerald creates vivid, timeless characters -- a dissatisfied southern belle seeking adventure in the north; the tragic hero of the title story who lost more than money in the stock market; giddy and dissipated young men and women of the interwar period. From the lazy town of Tarleton, Georgia, to the glittering cosmopolitan centers of New York and Paris, Fitzgerald brings the society of the "Lost Generation" to life in these masterfully crafted gems, showcasing the many gifts of one of our most popular writers.
"Once you've become a part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real."
Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren's writing that "you should not read it if you cannot take a punch." The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. In this sixtieth anniversary edition, Algren presents 120 years of Chicago history through the lens of its "nobodies nobody knows" the tramps, hustlers, aging bar fighters, freed death-row inmates, and anonymous working stiffs who prowl its streets. Upon its original publication in 1951, Algren's Chicago: City on the Make was scorned by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and local journalists for its gritty portrayal of the city and its people, one that boldly defied City Hall's business and tourism initiatives. Yet the book captures the essential dilemma of Chicago: the dynamic tension between the city's breathtaking beauty and its utter brutality, its boundless human energy and its stifling greed and violence. The sixtieth anniversary edition features historic Chicago photos and annotations on everything from defunct slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, "the best book about Chicago."
A National Review Top Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Century "One of Orwell's very best books and perhaps the best book that exists on the Spanish Civil War."--The New Yorker In 1936, originally intending merely to report on the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, George Orwell found himself embroiled as a participant--as a member of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unity. Fighting against the Fascists, he described in painfully vivid and occasionally comic detail life in the trenches--with a "democratic army" composed of men with no ranks, no titles, and often no weapons--and his near fatal wounding. As the politics became tangled, Orwell was pulled into a heartbreaking conflict between his own personal ideals and the complicated realities of political power struggles. Considered one of the finest works by a man V. S. Pritchett called "the wintry conscience of a generation," Homage to Catalonia is both Orwell's memoir of his experiences at the front and his tribute to those who died in what he called a fight for common decency. This edition features a new foreword by Adam Hochschild placing the war in greater context and discussing the evolution of Orwell's views on the Spanish Civil War. "No one except George Orwell . . . made the violence and self-dramatization of Spain so burning and terrible."-- Alfred Kazin, New York Times "A wise book, one that once read will never be forgotten."--Chicago Sunday Tribune
The inside story of American Indian life in Chicago
This dynamic social history focuses on Chicago during a thirty-year period of remarkable demographic growth that saw the city's American Indian population increase by twentyfold. James B. LaGrand places the Indian people within the context of many of the twentieth century's major themes, including rural to urban migration, the expansion of the wage labor economy, increased participation in and acceptance of political radicalism, and growing interest in ethnic nationalism. Drawing on community newsletters, periodicals, oral histories, and census materials, this case study demonstrates the profound effects of this pan-Indian identity on both urban and reservation Indian communities.
The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by the preeminent Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, is a restoration of the author's phrases, words, and images that were excised from the 1940 edition, giving new luster to an unfinished literary masterpiece. It is the story of the young Hollywood mogul Monroe Stahr, who was inspired by the life of boy-genius Irving Thalberg, and is an expose of the studio system in its heyday. The Love of the Last Tycoon is now available for the first time in paperback.
![Marvel 1602 [New Printing]](https://bookshop.newberry.org/sites/bookshop.newberry.org/files/imagecache/product_list/isbn_images/9780785141341.jpg)
Collects Marvel 1602 (2003) #1-8. The year is 1602, and strange things are stirring in England. In the service of Queen Elizabeth, court magician Dr. Stephen Strange senses that the bizarre weather plaguing the skies above is not of natural origin. Her majesty's premier spy, Sir Nicholas Fury, fends off an assassination attempt on the Queen by winged warriors rumored to be in service to a mad despot named Doom. News is spreading of witchbreed sightings - young men bearing fantastic superhuman powers and abilities. And in the center of the rising chaos is Virginia Dare, a young girl newly arrived from the New World, guarded by a towering Indian warrior. Can Fury and his allies find a connection to these unusual happenings before the whole world ends?
This work takes an in-depth look at the world of comic books through the eyes of a Native American reader and offers frank commentary on the medium's cultural representation of the Native American people. It addresses a range of portrayals, from the bloodthirsty barbarians and noble savages of dime novels, to formulaic secondary characters and sidekicks, and, occasionally, protagonists sans paternal white hero, examining how and why Native Americans have been consistently marginalized and misrepresented in comics. Chapters cover early representations of Native Americans in popular culture and newspaper comic strips, the Fenimore Cooper legacy, the "white" Indian, the shaman, revisionist portrayals, and Native American comics from small publishers, among other topics.
No One Knows Their Blood Type is a novel of identity, belonging, and conflicting truths--of stories, secrets, songs, rumors, and lies. On the day that her father dies, Jumana makes a discovery about her blood type. Hers could not have been inherited from her father--the father she sometimes longed for, but always despised. This extraordinary novel of Palestine centers its narrative not on the battlefield of history, but on how women live every day and the colonial context of their embodied lives. With humor and exhilarating inventiveness, it asks: why aren't questions of love, friendship, parenthood, and desire at the core of our conversations about liberty and freedom? How would this transform our ideas of resistance?
First in the Old Filth trilogy. A New York Times Notable Book. "Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters" (The New York Times Book Review).
Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away.Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written an unforgettable novel reminiscent of Evan S. Connell's books Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, and Rudyard Kipling's Baa Baa, Black Sheep. Retracing much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history, Old Filth is the first installment of an immersive and atmospheric trilogy that, taken together, tells the moving story of a long, complicated marriage.
"Old Filth is an extraordinary novel--the structure, the characters, the sweep of time."--Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House "I don't know why Gardam isn't universally celebrated and beloved. Her prose is dazzling, and she writes with a kind of subdued but wicked humor that takes a moment to clamp down on you."--Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies "I think Jane Gardam is a genius and should be far more widely read. She has actually made me gasp, slap a book shut and say, 'She can't do that!, ' open it up and realize that she can, she has, and it works."--Denise Mina, author of Conviction SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZEA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
The New York Times Book Review
The Washington Post
The San Francisco Chronicle
New York Magazine
The Globe & Mail
Slate
"Will bring immense pleasure to readers who treasure fiction that is intelligent, witty, sophisticated and--a quality encountered all too rarely in contemporary culture--adult."--The Washington Post "Gardam is an exquisite storyteller, picking up threads, laying them down, returning to them and giving them new meaning . . . Old Filth is sad, funny, beautiful and haunting."--The Seattle Times "A masterpiece of storytelling."--The Dallas Morning News "[Jane Gardam is] the best contemporary British writer you probably haven't heard of."--Maureen Corrigan, NPR
During the Roaring '20s, African Americans rapidly transformed their Chicago into a "black metropolis." In this book, Christopher Robert Reed describes the rise of African Americans in Chicago's political economy, bringing to life the fleeting vibrancy of this dynamic period of racial consciousness and solidarity. Reed shows how African Americans rapidly transformed Chicago and achieved political and economic recognition by building on the massive population growth after the Great Migration from the South, the entry of a significant working class into the city's industrial work force, and the proliferation of black churches. Mapping out the labor issues and the struggle for control of black politics and black business, Reed offers an unromanticized view of the entrepreneurial efforts of black migrants, reassessing previous accounts such as St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton's 1945 study Black Metropolis. Utilizing a wide range of historical data, The Rise of Chicago's Black Metropolis, 1920-1929 delineates a web of dynamic social forces to shed light on black businesses and the establishment of a black professional class. The exquisitely researched volume draws on fictional and nonfictional accounts of the era, black community guides, mainstream and community newspapers, contemporary scholars and activists, and personal interviews.