Join the HCSF Reading Group to discuss "Tinkers" by Paul Harding
December 10, 2023
4:30-6:00 pm
All Virtual, Zoom
The Zoom login in will be emailed to registrants two days before meeting.
HCSF Members: Free, but RSVP required
Non-Members: $10
Click here to register
Zoom meeting link and dial-in information will be sent the day before the event at 5pm and an hour before the event to those who RSVP. Please make sure you are all set to use Zoom before the conference. Click here to Get Started on Zoom.
Event Registration (Harvard Alumni):
Please sign in with your HarvardKey otherwise a duplicate record will be created and you will not be able to log-in.
No HarvardKey? Please retrieve your HarvardKey here. If you need help, email ithelp@harvard.edu or call 617-495-7777
Tinkers
Paul Harding 191 pages 2009
Harding's debut novel shocked the literary world when it won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction––the first small-independent-press book to do so in 30 years. According to that year’s Jury Chairwoman, "“Sentence for sentence, it was the most beautifully written and most gorgeous use of language of any of the books we looked at.”
From The New Yorker: "Harding's narrator dips in and out of the consciousness of a New England patriarch named George Washington Crosby as he lies dying on a hospital bed in his living room, 'right where they put the dining room table, fitted with its two extra leaves for holiday dinners.' The story traces Crosby’s life back to his hardscrabble Maine childhood, where his father was a tinker and travelling salesman who suffered from epileptic seizures. Crosby’s emotional life is dominated by his father’s abandonment of the family on learning that his wife was planning to have him institutionalized, but the most memorable parts of Harding’s novel may be his depiction of a nineteenth-century landscape complete with mule-drawn carts and “frozen wood so brittle that it rang when you split it.” In Harding’s skillful evocation, Crosby’s life, seen from its final moments, becomes a mosaic of memories, 'showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment.’”
Harding has taught expository writing at Harvard.
Meeting organizer:
Kirsten Miclau
readinggroup@harvardclubsf.org