Thalia Book Club: A Celebration of Jane Austen, with Karen Joy Fowler and other Janeites

Selections read by Hope Davis, Karen Joy Fowler, author of the best-selling The Jane Austen Book Club, and other enthusiasts fete the object of their affection.

Performance playlist:

Reading From Pride And Prejudice
Hope Davis

Conversation
Jennifer Egan, Karen Joy Fowler and Siri Hustvedt

JANE AUSTEN    was born on December 16, 1775 at Steventon, near Basingstoke, the seventh child of the rector of the parish. She lived with her family at Steventon  until  they moved to Bath when her father  retired in 1801. After his death in 1805, she moved around  with her mother;  in 1809, they settled in Chawton, near Alton, Hampshire. Here she remained, except for a few visits to London, until in May 1817 she moved to Winchester to be near her doctor. There she died on July 18, 1817. Jane Austen was extremely modest about her own genius, describing her work to her nephew Edward as "the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory, on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour." As a girl she wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. Her works were published only after much revision, four novels being published in her lifetime. They are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice  (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). Two other novels, Northanger Abbey  and Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1817 with a biographical notice by her brother Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship.  Persuasion was written in a race against failing health in 1815-1816. She also left two earlier compositions , a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons.  At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sandition, a fragmentary draft of which survives.  

HOPE DAVIS has appeared in films including The Weather Man, Proof, Duma, The Matador, About Schmidt, American Splendor, The Secret Lives of Dentists ,Hearts in Atlantis, Joe Gould's Secret, Mumford, Arlington Road,  The Daytrippers, Next Stop Wonderland  and The Myth of Fingerprints. She appeared in Ivanov and Two Shakespearean Actors at the Lincoln Center, Food Chain at the Westside Arts Theatre, and Measure for Measure at the Delacorte Theatre and the New York Shakespeare Festival.    

JENNIFER EGAN is the author of the novels Look At  Me (a finalist for the National Book Award) and The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in such magazines as The New Yorker, Harper's, GQ, Zoetrope, and  PloughShares,  and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. Her next novel, due out this August from Knopf, is The Keep. Egan lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn.   

 KAREN JOY FOWLER, a PEN/Faulkner and Dublin IMPAC nominee, is the author of The Jane Austen Book Club, The  Sweethear t Season, Sarah Canary and Sister Noon. Black Glass: Short Fictions received the World Fantasy Award for best collection in 1999, and her short stories have garnered nominations for the Hugo and Nebula awards. She lives in Davis, California.

SIRI HUSTVEDT  is the author of the novels The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, and What I Loved,  which was shortlisted for prizes including France's Prix Etranger Femina and England's Waterstone's Literary Fiction Award. It won the Prix des Librairies du Quebec for best book of 2003. She has also published a book of poetry, Reading to You, and the books of essays, Yonder, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Meditations on Painting, and A Plea For Eros.  Hustvedt lives in Brooklyn with her husband,  Paul Auster.