Georgetown Library Sunday Book Club

A monthly book club

In July we'll discuss two classic American novellas: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and Train Dreams by Denis Johnson.

About the books:

Of Mice and Men is a 1937 novella written by American author John Steinbeck. It describes the experiences of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, as they move from place to place in California, searching for jobs during the Great Depression. Steinbeck based the novella on his own experiences as a teenager working alongside migrant farm workers in the 1910s, before the arrival of the Okies whom he would describe in his novel The Grapes of Wrath. The title is taken from Robert Burns' poem "To a Mouse": "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley" ("The best-laid plans of mice and men / Often go awry"). Of Mice and Men has been a frequent target of censorship and book bans for vulgarity and for what some consider offensive and racist language. Consequently, it appears on the American Library Association's list of the Most Challenged Books of the 21st Century.

Train Dreams is a novella by Denis Johnson published in book form in 2011. (It was originally published, in slightly different form, in the Summer 2002 issue of The Paris Review.) The novella details the life of Robert Grainier, an American railroad laborer. Born in 1886, orphaned by age six and placed with cousins, he's not outwardly remarkable or compelling as the episodes of his life unfold. He marries Gladys and fathers Kate while working for a timber company, and he witnesses disparate events and characters from influenza epidemics and the advent of automobiles and airplanes to an unscheduled area stop by a young Elvis Presley. The novella won an O. Henry Award in 2003 and the 2002 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. It was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but no award was given that year.

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