Past Literature Symposia have been held on the following works from the following areas:
The Middle East & Egypt
The Bible
Gilgamesh
Egyptian Book of the Dead
Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of Birds
Ibn al-Arabi, The Ringstones of Wisdom
Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat
Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah
Rumi, poems
Hafiz, poems
India
Mahabharata (Bhagavad Gita)
Ramayana
Upanishads
Dhammapada & Buddhist Discourses
Nagarjuna, Wisdom of the Middle Way
China
I-Ching
Confucius, Analects
Lao Tzu, Dao De Jing
Mencius
Zhuangzi
Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian
Japan
Murasaki, Tale of Genji
Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book
Kenkō, Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa)
Dōgen, Shobogenzo
Yukio Mishima
Haruki Murakami
Greece
Heraclitus, fragments
Parmenides, fragments
Sappho, poems & fragments
Homer, Iliad & Odyssey
Herodotus, The Histories
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian Wars
Aeschylus, plays
Xenophon, Memorabilia; Education of Cyrus; Hellenica; Anabasis
Rome
Seneca, Letters
Lucretius, The Nature of Things
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Catullus, poems
Plutarch, Parallel Lives
Petronius, Satyricon
Russia
Tolstoy
Gogol
Dostoevsky
Chekhov
Pushkin
Pasternak
Solzhenitsyn
Bulgakov
Leskov
South & Central America
Popol Vuh
Jorge Lus Borges
Octavio Paz
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Clarice Lispector
Julio Cortázar
Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa
Chinua Achebe
Wole Soyinka
Amos Tutuola
Ben Okri
Tayeb Salih
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Europe and the West
Njals Saga
Egils Saga
Beowulf
St. Augustine
Leonardo da Vinci
Shakespeare
Meister Eckhart
Flaubert
Balzac
Stendhal
Simone Weil
Kingsley Amis
North America
Emerson
Thoreau
Hawthorne
Melville
Mark Twain
William Gaddis
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Frederick Douglass
Zora Neale Hurston
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Jean Toomer
Contemporary Literature
Alice Munro
Claire Keegan
Susan Sontag
Thomas Pynchon
Claudia Rankine
William H. Gass
David Antin
Mark Fisher
Poetry
William Blake
Byron
Emily Dickinson
Ezra Pound
Frank O’Hara
Hart Crane
The Institute for Creative Inquiry 