We continue with the Reading Club meetings to analyze and discuss different works of North American literature, in a new format and with a new facilitator.
After a prior individualized reading, the works will be discussed in a group on the day of the meeting. we have Maria Willstedt as a moderator who will make a brief introduction, ask questions and animate the conversation.
For the month of December we will focus on the short story “The Gift of the Three Wise Men” by O. Henry and the additional stories “The Duplicity of Hargraves” and “The Redemption of Calliope.”
They are available on the internet en español but you can also read in any of the editions published on paper.
“In a panoramic view of the North American novel, William Sidney Porter (1862-1910), better known under the pseudonym O. Henry, deserves a very particular place. Edgar Allan Poe had maintained that every story should be written based on its outcome; O. Henry exaggerated this doctrine and thus arrived at the trick story, to the story whose final line lurks a surprise. O. Henry, like Don Juan Manuel de Rosas, read the dictionary from the first page to the last, perhaps believing he had acquired the sum of knowledge. Such a procedure, in the long run, has something mechanical; O. Henry has left us, however, more than one brief and pathetic masterpiece like “The Gift of the Magi.” His work, which includes several novels and a hundred short stories, is a mirror of a New York lost in nostalgia and a West of old adventurers – wrote Jorge Luis Borges. ”
Extracted from the Losada publishing house.