​NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 
 
The  Novel Today Summer 2025   LITR1-CE 9270 Wednesday: 1:00 PM- 2:40  PM;   Thursday: 1:00 PM- 2:40  PM Margaret Boe Birns  
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Discuss major new work by today’s top writers, including emerging novelists, award-winners, and established favorites, all of whom are central to today's cultural conversation.   We will investigate a variety of inventive narrative strategies, explore the psychology of numerous fascinating characters, and examine important topics within a context of changing times, changing lives and a changing world.  We will explore tales of two cities, New York and Los Angeles, featuring a noir intrigue involving the making of Gone with the Wind;  an old man and a mysterious horse  in the high desert of central Nevada;   a famous fraud, and a sharp smart woman in London; a  bat-mitzvah,  a Christ­mas play, an inter­faith fam­i­ly, and a young girl’s coming of age in Italy; six cosmonauts traveling through space as they behold and record our blue planet; magic in the Mexican highlands. Readings: Amor Towles table for Two; Willy Vlautin, The Horse; Anita Desai, Rosarita; Zadie Smith, The Fraud; AB Yehoshua, The Only Daughter;   Samantha Harvey, Orbital. Students should read Rosarita, by Anita Desai for the first class.
 


THE NEW SCHOOL 
Mystery Masterworks: American Noir
Online/Asynchronous

A fusion of gothic fiction and the detective story, the American “noir” novel is both a distinctive contribution to the mystery novel and an impressive genre in its own right. Simultaneously dreamlike and realistic, the Noir Novel’s mean streets and nightmare alleys, along with their world-weary heroes and femme fatales have evolved into literary and cultural symbols with archetypal resonance. We will explore these novels as expressions of social and political protest and commentary, but also as aesthetically satisfying depictions of an entire psychology, or even as a manifestation of a singular type of existential philosophy. Readings include major American modern noir classics, including: Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep; Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon ; James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice;  Cornell Woolrich, The Bride Wore Black; Dorothy B. Hughes, The Expendable Man; William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley; Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water; Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock 

Roundtable; 92nd Street Y Online

Mistress of Mystery: Four Novels By Agatha Christie        Margaret Boe Birns
 
Known as the Queen of Crime and the Mistress of Mystery, Agatha Christie is the world’s most well-known mystery writer; her work has been outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Recently she has also earned a reputation as a significant literary artist, and is now receiving serious attention by scholars, literary critics, social critics and even scientists, who have noted that her language patterns stimulate higher than usual activity in the brain.  In discussing five of her classic mysteries, we will examine the considerable uncertainty and disorder underneath her seemingly cozy worlds, which, far from remaining conservative enclaves, address modern times, modern problems, and the realities of war, social change,  unraveling traditions, emerging modernities. We will also examine themes of illusion and truth, appearance and reality, criminal psychology, and the nature of justice, as well as Christie’s highly inventive narrative strategies and the psychology of her two great detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Readings will feature a Miss Marple mystery in a village rocked by modernity after World War Two: a suspenseful mystery centering on one of Christie’s classic devious masterminds; the very first Hercule Poirot mystery and the very last Hercule mystery. 
 
Schedule of Readings:
 
  1. June 10    The Mysterious Affair at Styles
  2. June 24     A Murder Is Announced    
  3. July 8        Towards Zero
  4.  July 22     Curtain 


Summer 2025
Online/Asynchronous

A fusion of gothic fiction and the detective story, the American “noir” novel is both a distinctive contribution to the mystery novel and an impressive genre in its own right. Simultaneously dreamlike and realistic, the Noir Novel’s mean streets and nightmare alleys, along with their world-weary heroes and femme fatales have evolved into literary and cultural symbols with archetypal resonance. We will explore these novels as expressions of social and political protest and commentary, but also as aesthetically satisfying depictions of an entire psychology, or even as a manifestation of a singular type of existential philosophy. Readings include major American modern noir classics, including: Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep; Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon ; James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice;  Cornell Woolrich, The Bride Wore Black; Dorothy B. Hughes, The Expendable Man; William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley; Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water; Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock.