Two CLSC selections for 2023 have been announced!

The Week Seven selection is Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson (Simon & Schuster).

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now, that way of life is threatened. Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love —between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. An essential novel for our times.

The Week Six selection is The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (Hatchette Book Group).

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world but a future almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change how you think about the climate crisis. 

CLSC Season Theme 2023: Imagination

Imagination is essential to storytelling and to our experiences of reading and learning. To imagine evokes the individual and the collective and invites all its users to be absorbed in creativity, resourcefulness, possibility, and insightfulness. Imagination encourages us to speculate, to conceptualize our past and present, and offer alternative futures as universes full of life and potential. To imagine, we must reflect on our history and epistemologies – how we know what we know – to consider our present as an assemblage of what could have been and what could be. When considering imagination, it’s essential to ask: What possibilities does individual and collective imagining hold for our world? How do we inspire imagination? How and why do we convey our imaginings to one another? Whose imagination becomes reality and why? Can imagination go too far? How do we promote imaginations that are more encompassing in their reaches, instead of those that benefit only a select few? The power of imagination is represented in various forms, such as stories, performances, campaigns, propaganda, national places, and societal norms. This year, the CLSC will explore imaginings old and new: from the muffled and the bold, to the comforting and the unsettling, the local and universal, and more.

The Week Nine CLSC selection features Dawnie Walton’s The Final Revival of Opal & Nev. Named a best book of 2021 by Barack Obama, The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, Goodreads, The Millions, Reader’s Digest, and Kirkus Reviews, among others, The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is an electrifying novel about the meteoric rise of an iconic interracial rock duo in the 1970s, their sensational breakup, and the dark secrets unearthed when they try to reunite decades later for one last tour. This CLSC Author Presentation will take place at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, August 25, 2022, in the Hall of Philosophy. If you cannot join us on the grounds, you can join us from home on CHQ Assembly. 

The Week Nine CLSC Young Readers selection is Kate Milford’s The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book: A Greenglass House Story.

For 30 years, Ryan Busse chased his childhood dream and built a successful career selling millions of firearms for one of America’s most popular gun companies. He is an avid hunter, outdoorsman, and conservationist–all things that the firearms industry was built on.

However, in Gunfight, Ryan argues that the gun industry has abandoned its self-imposed decency in favor of hardline conservatism and McCarthyesque internal policing, sowing irreparable division in our politics and society. America's gun industry has shifted from prioritizing safety and ethics to one that is addicted to fear, conspiracy, intolerance, and secrecy. He recounts his personal transformation and shows how authoritarianism spreads in the guise of freedom, how voicing one's conscience becomes an act of treason in a culture that demands sameness and loyalty.

Ryan Busse is a former firearms executive who helped build one of the world’s most iconic gun companies, and was nominated multiple times by industry colleagues for the prestigious Shooting Industry Person of The Year Award. Busse is an environmental advocate who served in many leadership roles for conservation organizations, including as an advisor for the United States Senate Sportsmen’s Caucus and the Biden Presidential Campaign. He remains a proud outdoorsman, gun owner, father, and resident of Montana.

― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

The Week Seven CLSC selection features Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Evicted draws on years of embedded fieldwork and painstakingly gathered data to transform our understanding of inequity and economic exploitation in America. This CLSC Author Presentation will take place at 10:45 a.m. on Tuesday, August 9, 2022, in the Amphitheater in collaboration with the Chautauqua Lecture Series. If you’re not able to join us on the grounds, you can join us from home on CHQ Assembly. 

The Week Seven CLSC Young Readers selection is Tae Keller’s Jennifer Chan is Not Alone. All interested young readers and family members should join us on Sunday, August 7, 2022, at 1:00 p.m. on the Hultquist Center porch for our book discussion and themed activity. 

This gathering will also feature our Early Reader’s selection, Mi Casa is My Home by Laurenne Sala and Zara González Hoang. We encourage you to read our CLSC Young Reader Classic Selections for this summer: The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros and Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. 
 

― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

The Week Six CLSC selection features Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle. Great Circle is a “masterclass in historical fiction” according to The Telegraph. In effortless and dazzling prose, Maggie Shipstead weaves together an expansive story that covers more than a century. This CLSC Author Presentation will take place at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, August 4, 2022, in the Hall of Philosophy. A book signing will follow on the porch of Alumni Hall. If you’re not able to join us on the grounds, you can join us from home on CHQ Assembly. 

Don’t miss the CLSC Book Discussion on Monday, August 1, 2022, at 12:15 p.m. on the porch of the Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall (and streamed live via the Chautauqua Literary Arts Facebook page) featuring co-presenters Dr. Susan Allen and Melanie Ritzenthaler.

The Week Six CLSC Young Readers selection is Edith’s graphic novel rendition of the classic Tom’s Midnight Garden.

― Anna North, Outlawed

The Week Five CLSC selection features Anna North’s Outlawed. Centered on irresistibly no-nonsense, courageous, and determined heroine, Outlawed dusts off the myth of the old West and reignites the glimmering promise of the frontier with an entirely new set of feminist stakes. This CLSC Author Presentation will take place at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, July 28, 2022, in the Hall of Philosophy. A book signing will follow on the porch of the Alumni Hall. If you cannot join us on the grounds, you can join us from home on CHQ Assembly.

― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Week Four's CLSC selection features Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. This book examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how a hierarchy of social divisions still defines our lives. This CLSC Author Presentation has been postponed. Chautauqua is working with Ms. Wilkerson to reschedule the program to happen in the Fall or online.  That should give you plenty of time to read it beforehand!

-- Erica Chenoweth, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know

The Week Three CLSC selection features Erica Chenoweth’s Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know. In this book, Chenoweth — one of the world’s leading scholars on the topic–explains what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance. Featuring both historical cases of civil resistance and more contemporary examples such as the Arab Awakenings and various ongoing movements in the United States, this book provides a comprehensive yet pithy overview of this enormously important subject. This CLSC Author Presentation will take place on Thursday, July 14, 2022, at 3:30 p.m. in the Hall of Philosophy. A book signing on the porch of the Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall will follow. This CLSC Author Presentation will be streamed live on CHQ Assembly and be available on-demand for the following week. 

Don’t miss the CLSC Book Discussion on Monday, July 11, 2022, at 12:15 p.m. on the porch of the Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall with co-presenters Philip Allen and Margaret Edwards.

― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

The Week Two CLSC program features Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. This CLSC Author Presentation will take place on Thursday, July 7, 2022, at 3:30 p.m. in the Hall of Philosophy. A book signing on the porch of the Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall will follow.