I’ve begun teaching a writing class on “the city” and a senior seminar on “work.” Here are the reading requirements for the two courses:

City:

Mike Davis’s book on L.A. entitled City of Quartz, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, a World War Two memoir A Woman in Berlin by an anonymous female journalist, and Suketu Mehta’s book on Bombay called Maximum City. Other texts: Vivian Gornick on how to write about New York City in Approaching Eye Level; a chapter from Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, a book of travels through small towns; Hanif Kureishi’s “Bradford,” an account of a visit to the “city of knives”; war-reportage by Joan Didion from San Salvador and Susan Sontag from Sarajevo; Lisa Brawley on the boomtown that is Guantanamo. Also W.G. Sebald, Edmund Wilson, Jonathan Raban, Walter Benjamin, and Michel de Certeau.

Work:

Charles Dickens, Hard Times; John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Studs Terkel, Working; Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickle and Dimed; Sam Selvon, Lonely Londoners; Hari Kunzru, Transmission; and Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living. In addition, we will read and discuss the following texts that will be distributed in class: George Saunders, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” and “Christmas,” essays by David Sedaris and Richard Rodriguez, excerpts from Andrew Ross’s Fast Boat to China, John Berger’s, A Seventh Man, and Isabel Hilton’s report, “Made in China.” I will also put on library reserve Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me” and Stephen Frears’ “Dirty Pretty Things.”