Alumni-Led Virtual Book Club

Join the St. Olaf Alumni Virtual Book Club for a Discussion of The Human Stain by Philip Roth!

Founded by alumni in the DC/Baltimore area, this book club is open to all St. Olaf graduates and friends of the college. Whether you’re a lifelong reader or just love discussing great books, we’d love to have you join us!

About the Book

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.

Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk’s secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk’s astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, “magnificently” interwoven with “the larger public history of modern America.”

Zoom meeting details will be provided via email after registration.

Questions: Michele Foss ’97

Please note that the St. Olaf Virtual Book Club is a volunteer-led initiative. The gatherings are designed to be casual and social, with conversations flowing organically from the attendees.