LitSalon Shorts booking now:

“I’m posting this LitSalon Short as a ‘taster’ for anyone considering joining me for the full study of Vladimir Nabokov’s notorious 1955 masterpiece Lolita, starting on 17 September. Participants in this single meeting will also get a feel for my facilitation style.”

Nancy Goldstein

In this LitSalon Short we’ll be discussing Signs and Symbols (1948), one of Nabokov’s shortest and most highly regarded stories. It’s a simple tale about ageing Belarusian immigrant parents visiting a mentally ill son who has been confined in a sanatorium for years with “referential mania” — the conviction that the natural world is speaking to him, and about him, in a coded language.

Or is it? What is Nabokov up to here, luring the reader into a narrative peppered with precisely the kinds of signs and symbols that encourage the son’s mania?

As for Lolita. I’m convinced that now more than ever it is time to read Nabokov’s masterpiece. The man who famously described himself as “an American writer, born in Russia” understands his adopted country as only an immigrant can.

Born into Russian nobility, Nabokov fled for his life twice: first escaping the 1917 Revolution for Berlin and Paris, and then, in 1940, fleeing Nazi-era Paris for New York City alongside his Jewish wife, Véra. A respected lepidopterist, Nabokov spent years working at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.

The immigrant, the scientist, and the novelist brought all he knew about camouflage, metamorphosis, mimicry, migration and classification to his writing.

Lolita combines Nabokov’s keen observations of the new, post-WWII superpower that is late 1940s America with his scalpel-like dexterity with the English language.

One of the world’s most banned books? Yes.

A savage send-up of a country awash in Norman Rockwell imagery and pop psychology? A land where clueless elites become intellectually complicit in a world that infantilises adults while sexualising children? Yes.

Narrated through the notoriously unreliable perspective of one Humbert Humbert, aka Paedophile-in-Chief? Yes.

Hilarious and infuriating by turns, but always mesmerising? Yes.

Our eight meeting study of Lolita begins on Thursday 17 September 2026

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single session LitSalon Short on Vladimir Nabokov’s Signs and Symbols led by Dr Nancy Goldstein (all registrants will receive from Nancy a copy of the story as Nabokov intended it to be read).
• Thursday 6 August 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time), live on Zoom
• ‘LitSalon Shorts’ are single-session studies (usually slightly shorter than a typical Salon study meeting) in which a facilitator shares with the wider Salon community their enthusiasm for an aspect of literature or culture.
• ‘Shorts’ are offered free-of-charge, but numbers are limited so please use the booking form below to reserve a place. Although there is no fee for this Short, Nancy asks you to consider making a donation – perhaps the price of your last G&T or flat white? – to José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, which feeds hungry people in war and emergency zones all over the world, from Gaza and Ukraine to Pakistan and areas struggling with natural disasters.

“The dangerous times and fatal genius of Shakespeare’s greatest rival” is the subtitle of Professor Stephen Greenblatt’s 2025 life of Christopher Marlowe, Dark Renaissance. In her review of Greenblatt’s book, Professor Emma Smith declares that “Marlowe’s life is chock-full of under-evidenced incidents that are charged with a thrilling imaginative energy. He emerges from fragmentary records already fully formed: a spy, a double agent, an atheist, a sodomite.” We will begin this LitSalon Short with a short survey of the highlights of Marlowe’s brief, exhilarating and controversial life (1564-1593), before considering how art reflects life in Marlowe’s dramatic and poetical works.

On stage, Marlowe’s characters – Tamburlaine, Barabas, Faustus – demonstrate boundless self-confidence as they over-reach human, moral and physical boundaries, attempting to subordinate the natural order and the cosmos itself to their individual will. The language they use is filled with electrifying energy, breath-taking sonorities and dazzling verbal imagery.

Drawing on the depth of his rich classical education (the aesthetics and metamorphoses of Ovid, extended and elaborate similes à la Homer, the passion and brutality of Senecan tragedy, and the power of the persuasive oratory of Cicero and Demosthenes), Marlowe’s literary works also abound in the fruit of the humanist learning of his time, not least Ortelius’ influential atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), consulted to provide geographic precision and exotic, ravishing naming of places.

In the theatre, Marlowe pioneered what Ben Jonson called “Marlowe’s Mighty Line”: unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse). In launching an assault on his predecessors and their “jiggling veins of rhyming mother wits”, he provided the standard dramatic literary form that was to be adopted and developed by Shakespeare and other later playwrights.

During this LitSalon Short we will focus on the two parts of Marlowe’s first great masterpiece, Tamburlaine the Great, using these plays to illustrate his linguistic pyrotechnics and literary genius.

Tim will go on to lead a five-week study of Part 1 of Tamburlaine on Wednesdays 6.00-8.00pm (UK time) beginning on Wednesday 16 September.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single session ‘LitSalon Short’ led by Tim Swinglehurst
• Tuesday 18 August, 6.00 – 7.15 pm (UK time)
• Free of charge but please use the booking form below to reserve your place.

“I’m posting this LitSalon Short as a ‘taster’ for anyone considering joining me for the six-meeting study of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, starting 21 October 2026, 6.30–8.30 pm (UK time). Participants will also get a feel for my facilitation style.”

Nancy Goldstein

In this LitSalon Short we’ll be discussing Roman Fever (1934), one of Wharton’s most perfectly constructed stories — and, at eight pages, one of the most efficient. Two wealthy American widows, old friends and old rivals, sit on a Roman terrace watching their daughters. Over the course of an afternoon conversation, a buried secret surfaces. The ending is one of the great last lines in the American short story.

Wharton understood, as only an insider could, that in a world where women’s power is almost entirely social, silence is not passivity. It is strategy.

As for The Age of Innocence. Published in 1920 — the same year American women won the right to vote — it is set in a world Wharton knew from the inside: Old New York society, a closed world of inherited money and rigid ritual revolving around the unspoken rule that nothing shall ever, under any circumstances, be said plainly. What cannot be acknowledged cannot threaten. What cannot be named cannot exist. She knew that the real cost of a society built on appearances isn’t borne by the people who break the rules. It’s borne by the people who keep them.

Our six-meeting study of The Age of Innocence begins on Wednesday 21 October 2026.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single session LitSalon Short on Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever, led by Dr Nancy Goldstein. The story is available free online via the linked text above.
• Wednesday 23 September, 5.00–6.30 pm (UK time), live on Zoom
• ‘LitSalon Shorts’ are single-session studies (usually slightly shorter than a typical Salon study meeting) in which a facilitator shares with the wider Salon community their enthusiasm for an aspect of literature or culture.
• Shorts are offered free of charge, but numbers are limited so please use the booking form below to reserve a place. Although there is no fee for this Short, Nancy asks you to consider making a donation — perhaps the price of your last G&T or flat white? — to José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, which feeds hungry people in war and emergency zones all over the world, from Gaza and Ukraine to Pakistan and areas struggling with natural disasters.

“I’m posting this LitSalon Short as a ‘taster’ for anyone considering joining the full study of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, starting on Thursday, 12 November, 6.30–8.30 pm (UK time). Participants will also get a feel for my facilitation style.”

Nancy Goldstein

In this LitSalon Short we’ll be discussing Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1891), one of Wilde’s most deliciously cynical short stories. A society fortune-teller reads Lord Arthur’s palm at a London dinner party and discovers something so alarming that Lord Arthur resolves to act on it immediately — before he can be held responsible for the consequences. What follows is a comedy of manners so dark it is practically a thriller, and a satire of upper-class Victorian morality that barely needs to exaggerate its source material.

Or does it? Wilde’s central joke — that a man of honour must commit a crime in order to fulfil his social obligations — is both absurd and completely logical. The story asks, deadpan, what it means to do the right thing, and arrives at an answer that should perhaps trouble us more than it does.

This Short is also a way in to our upcoming study of The Picture of Dorian Gray — a novel Wilde’s fin de siècle critics denounced as unclean and dangerous, even though Stoddart had already gone through the original manuscript, pencil in hand, crossing out some 500 words to make it acceptable. One hundred and thirty-six years on, Wilde’s central question feels less like Victorian Gothic and more like Monday morning: what are we willing to sacrifice — integrity, authenticity, other people — to keep the image intact? Wilde knew, long before Instagram did, that the real corruption isn’t the sins you commit; it’s the lengths you’ll go to make sure nobody sees them.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single session LitSalon Short on Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (which can be downloaded from links in this post) led by Dr Nancy Goldstein
• Thursday 8 October, 5.00–6.30 pm (UK), live on Zoom
• ‘LitSalon Shorts’ are single-session studies (usually slightly shorter than a typical Salon study meeting) in which a facilitator shares with the wider Salon community their enthusiasm for an aspect of literature or culture.
• Shorts are offered free of charge, but numbers are limited so please use the booking form below to reserve a place. Although there is no fee for this Short, Nancy asks you to consider making a donation — perhaps the price of your last G&T or flat white? — to José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, which feeds hungry people in war and emergency zones all over the world, from Gaza and Ukraine to Pakistan and areas struggling with natural disasters.

“But where will you be? Where’s your abode?
You’re a man of mystery, as God is my maker.”

from Simon Armitage’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Believed to date from around 1400 and regarded as one of finest surviving examples of Middle English poetry, we know little about who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight other than that they were from the North of England.

Set at Christmas in Camelot, the court of King Arthur, it is a mythic tale of magic and mystery in the age of chivalry that has attracted countless translators to explore its rich literary artistry and subtle psychological depth.

In this LitSalon Short we will consider the enduring appeal of this otherworldly wintry adventure and the translation by the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, which will be the subject of a four-meeting study led by Tim Swinglehurst in the weeks before Christmas.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single meeting LitSalon Short led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom
• Wednesday 28 October, 6.00-7.15 pm (UK time)
• LitSalon Shorts are offered free-of-charge, but please use the form below to reserve your place
• Recommended edition: Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Faber & Faber, 2007, ISBN 978-0-571-22328-2.

“I’m posting this LitSalon Short as a ‘taster’ for anyone considering joining me for the ten-meeting study of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, starting 14 January 2027, 6.30–8.30 pm (UK time). Participants will also get a feel for my facilitation style.”

Nancy Goldstein

In this LitSalon Short we’ll be discussing Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), one of the strangest and most haunting stories in American literature. Published in the same year as Bleak House, it echoes many of the themes in Charles Dickens’ novel.

A law office. A copyist who responds to every request with “I would prefer not to.” A system that cannot process a human being who simply stops complying.

Or can it? Melville’s central joke — that a man who does nothing is more destabilising than a man who does harm — is both absurd and completely logical. The story asks, with a perfectly straight face, what happens when a human being falls through the cracks of every institutional net designed to catch him.

As for Bleak House. Dickens’ masterpiece has at its centre Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a suit in Chancery that has consumed fortunes, ruined lives, and become its own self-perpetuating institution — a monument to procedural delay so vast and so perfectly constructed that it requires no villain to sustain it. The thematic overlap with Bartleby is exact: the way bureaucratic logic defeats human agency without anyone being visibly responsible. Dickens knew that the cruellest thing a corrupt system can do is not to break its own rules. It’s to follow them perfectly.

Our ten-meeting study of Bleak House begins on Thursday 14 January 2027.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single session LitSalon Short on Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, led by Dr Nancy Goldstein. The story is available free online via the linked text above.
• Thursday 12 November, 5.00–6.30 pm (UK time), live on Zoom
• ‘LitSalon Shorts’ are single-session studies (usually slightly shorter than a typical Salon study meeting) in which a facilitator shares with the wider Salon community their enthusiasm for an aspect of literature or culture.
• Shorts are offered free of charge, but numbers are limited so please use the booking form below to reserve a place. Although there is no fee for this Short, Nancy asks you to consider making a donation — perhaps the price of your last G&T or flat white? — to José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, which feeds hungry people in war and emergency zones all over the world, from Gaza and Ukraine to Pakistan and areas struggling with natural disasters.