Date: March 29, 2009

Book: Audrey Hepburn's Neck by Alan Brown

Time: 3:00 pm.

Place: Henry Krumholtz's house 4285 Arista Street San Diego CA 92103 (Mission Hills just in from the corner of Presidio Drive)

Background: "Alan Brown's first novel is a comic tale of sexual desire and bad manners set in contemporary Tokyo. Twenty-three-year-old cartoonist Toshi is obsessed with slim American women, and his best friend, an American named Paul, is obsessed with Japanese men. Toshi begins having an affair with Jane, his English teacher, who turns out to be insane; Paul has an endless stream of Japanese boyfriends all of whom leave him. Audrey Hepburn's Neck is slyly funny and very observant. Brown is equally concerned with sex as an obsession and the erotics of cultural differences, but his comic masterstrokes are in being able to conjure up the humor in looking for sex and the sometimes tragedy in getting it. Audrey Hepburn's Neck is resonant, charming and very witty."---Amazon.com review

A discussion of the book will be followed by a pot-luck dinner.

The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama

The Story of Zahra by Hanan al-Shaykh

The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea

One Hundred Years of Solitude  by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson  (non fiction)

Secret Life of Bees  by Sue Monk Kidd

Death In Venice  by Thomas Mann
The Razor's Edge  by W. Sommerset Maugham
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi  (non fiction)
Underworld  by Don Delillo
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Henvy V by Shakespeare
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth
West with the Night by Beryl Markham (non fiction)
The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Shalimar The Clown by Salman Rushdie
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Waiting by Ha Jin
The Dining Room by A. R. Gurney (play)
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen