Marta, Aïsha, and Meixi discuss Weike Wang’s Chemistry (Text, 2018), focusing on the novel's treatment of the experience of second-generation immigrants, relationships between parents and children, and the search for a vocation.

For more from the Hart House Student Literary and Library Committee, visit hhlitandlib.ca.

In the first episode of our third season, Marta, Aïsha, and Meixi discuss mental illness, social satire, and plotting and temporality in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018).

For more from the Hart House Student Literary and Library Committee, visit hhlitandlib.ca.

The third season of Endnote begins on Friday, August 12th! Here's a preview of what's in store.

Alex speaks with Professor Lauren Gillingham (uOttawa English) about nineteenth-century novelists' engagements with fashion as they relate to her forthcoming book, Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Cambridge UP). Key topics of conversation include nineteenth-century conceptions of time and history, fashion and class mobility, and two key novels—Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Dickens's Bleak House.

You can find the transcript for this episode at hhlitandlib.ca/endnote.

Sabryna speaks with Anvesh Jain about his debut poetry collection, Pilgrim to No Country (Frontenac Press, 2022), focusing on his explorations of immigrant experience, diaspora, and home-making.

You can find the book list and transcript for this episode at hhlitandlib.ca/endnote.

Alex offers a short introduction to investigative journalism—in particular, its beginnings in the 19th century. After a sketch of English journalistic history through the 1850s, he examines Dickens’s “On Duty with Inspector Field” (1851) and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), two early examples of investigative journalism, focusing on these journalists' intermingling of fictional and non-fictional reportage and their negotiation of disparate professional discourses.

You can find the book list for this episode at hhlitandlib.ca/endnote.

Subhi Jha, one of L&L’s equity and diversity officers, considers temporality and the absurd in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; then, Jacky Yu, L&L’s first-year representative, discusses the critique of “superhero morality” articulated in Alan Moore’s Watchmen.

You can find the transcript for this episode at hhlitandlib.ca/endnote.

Sabryna speaks with Mina Ivosev, winner of the Hart House Literary Contest in the prose category, about her prize-winning short story, “Birth by Landscape.”

You can find the book list and transcript for this episode at hhlitandlib.ca/endnote.

Alex speaks with Professor Garry Leonard (UofT English) about several Hollywood films, including It’s a Wonderful Life, It Happened One Night, and Pretty Woman, as they relate to his current book project, Six Ways of Looking at Modernity: Cinematic Genre and the Structure of Modern Subjectivity. Key topics of discussion include the relationship between cinema and modernism, the structure of cinematic genre, and the representation of the capitalist market and professionalisation in the Hollywood romance.

You can find the book list and transcript for this episode at hhlitandlib.ca/endnote.

On our special, holiday edition of Book Club, Aayu Pandey, one of L&L’s equity and diversity officers, considers dystopia and the interrelation of life and death in Kurt Vonnegut’s “2 B R 0 2 B”; then, Meixi and Marta discuss labour, poverty, and capitalism in George Saunders’s “Sea Oak.”

For the book list and transcript for this episode, visit hhlitandlib.ca/endnote.