Second Read: Lord of the Flies with Francine Prose, Akhil Sharma, & More

June’s Democracy Lab will mark the debut of a new series bringing together critics and writers to reread and reconsider classic and contemporary texts. This kick-off Second Read reexamines Lord of the Flies, the canonical dystopian novel by William Golding. Does the novel that middle and high schoolers around the country once had to swallow as a cautionary tale against all sorts of tyrannies during the Cold War still speak to us? Is it any good?

Francine Prose is the author of twenty works of fiction. Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent book is Mister Monkey. She lives in New York City.

Akhil Sharma is the author of Family Life, a New York Times Best Book of the Year and the winner of the International DUBLIN Literary Award and the Folio Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Award Stories. A native of Delhi, he lives in New York City and teaches English at Rutgers University–Newark.