Join the NOMA Book Club! Each month Book Club reads art-related fiction and non-fiction, and engages in discussion groups, curatorial programs and field trips correlating with each book.

Most Book Club programs start promptly at noon, but please come at 11:30 if you wish to bring a sack lunch and meet with friends. NOMA provides water and soft drinks. Please RSVP for the meetings you wish to attend.

Book Club members may buy their reading selections at the NOMA Museum Shop at a 20% discount. Call the Shop at 504.658.4133 for more information.

To join NOMA Book Club or for more information, contact 504.658.4117 or at bookclub@noma.org.

November’s Selection

Paul Gauguin: Letters to His Wife and Friends by Paul Gauguin

Gauguin’s writings, from Noa Noa to his Intimate Journals, show him to be a talented, uninhibited literary stylist, as far ahead of his time in words as he was on canvas. Nowhere is this more evident than in these letters to many of his closest associates and, above all, to his wife Mette, for whom he detailed his plans, described artworks in progress, and gave running accounts of his life and states of mind on distant shores. Now back in print after many years, Letters to His Wife and Friends remains one of the most revealing epistolary autobiographies ever assembled. (Overview available on barnesandnoble.com)

AND/OR

Typee: A Romance of The South Seas by Herman Melville (any edition)

Typee is Herman Melville’s first book, recounting his experiences after having jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands in 1842, and becoming a captive of a cannibal island tribe. It was an immediate success in America and England, and was Melville’s most popular work during his lifetime. It was not until the end of the 1930’s that it was surpassed in popularity by Moby Dick, more than thirty years after his death. The story provoked harsh criticism for its condemnation of missionary efforts in the Pacific Islands. Many sought to discredit the book, claiming that it was a work of fiction, but this criticism ended when the events it described were corroborated by Melville’s fellow castaway, Richard T. Greene, who appears in the story as the character Toby. (Overview available on barnesandnoble.com)