ASU Book Group: ‘The Nonconformists' by Brian Goodman

The ASU Book Group's January 2025 reading selection is “The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain” by Brian Goodman. The book group is open to all in the ASU community and meets monthly from noon to 1 p.m. with two different options for attendance: either in-person at Hayden Library, room 317* or virtually on Zoom. Register to attend in person or to receive a Zoom link.

In-person attendees are invited to join the author for lunch after at the University Club, no-host.

Haven't read the book? Come anyway! Authors are always present.

*Note new in-person location for 24-25.

Synopsis

“The Nonconformists” by Brian Goodman tells the story of a group of writers who crossed boundaries of language and politics, rearranging them in the process. The transnational circulation of literature played an important role in the formation of new subcultures and reading publics, reshaping political imaginations and transforming the city of Kafka into a global capital of dissent. From the postwar dream of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism” to the neoconservative embrace of Eastern bloc dissidence on the eve of the Velvet Revolution, history was changed by a collision of literary cultures.

Goodman is an assistant professor of English at ASU, where he is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Jewish Studies and the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies. He specializes in American studies, literature and human rights, and dissident cultures and has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books. While American readers were devouring Kafka, Czech writers and translators were eagerly following cultural trends in the United States, importing and creatively appropriating works by Langston Hughes and Ernest Hemingway. Bridging these two worlds, Goodman reconstructs the journeys of American writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth and John Updike to Prague, where they established lasting friendships with their Czech counterparts, including Josef Škvorecký, Václav Havel, Ivan Klíma, Ludvík Vaculík and Milan Kundera.  

About the book group

The ASU Book Group meetings and selections for 2024–25 are:

• Oct. 24 - "License to Travel" by Patrick Bixby

• Nov. 21 - “Elvis and the Colonel” by Marshall Terrill

• Dec. - no meeting

• Feb. 27 - "My Heart Is Bound Up with Them” by David Martinez

• Mar. 27 – TBD 

• Apr. 24 – “Mindscape of the Land” by Ryan Mores

The ASU Book Group is sponsored as a community outreach initiative hosted in partnership between the Department of English and ASU Library.