A Closer Look Book Club meets for an hour-long conversation about Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. The protagonist is a fictional orphan shipped by train in 1893 into the woods of the Idaho panhandle. He grows up to work on logging gangs, falls in love, and loses his wife and baby daughter to a particularly pernicious wildfire. He is an ordinary man in extraordinary times. “Buffeted by the loss of his family, Robert Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. It’s a love story, a hermit’s story and a refashioning of age-old wolf-based folklore like ‘Little Red Cap.’ It’s also a small masterpiece. You look up from the thing dazed, slightly changed.” Anthony Doerr, New York Times Book Review. Train Dreams was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

To participate in a Book Club conversation, just read the book and join us at the Poetry Center in Room 207. No sign-up is necessary. The Club is free and open to the public, and you’re welcome to participate in as many or as few meetings as you like.