Please join us this month as we discuss Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. The Bronx is currently having its first ever NEA Big Read hosted by the Bronx Council on the Arts and the New York Public Library’s Bronx Library Center. The title – To Kill A Mockingbird. To Kill a Mockingbird was first published in 1960. Since then it has won a Pulitzer and has been translated into more than 40 languages.

"That rare literary phenomenon, a Southern novel with no mildew on its magnolia leaves. Funny, happy and written with unspectacular precision, To Kill a Mockingbird is about conscience—how it is instilled in two children, Scout and Jem Finch; how it operates in their father, Atticus a lawyer appointed to defend a Negro on a rape charge, and how conscience crows in their small Alabama town." —Vogue "All of the tactile brilliance and none of the precocity generally supposed to be standard swamp-warfare issues for Southern writers... Novelist Lee's prose has an edge that cuts through cant, and she teaches the reader an astonishing number of use truths about little girls and about Southern life... Scout Finch is fiction's most pealing child since Carson McCullers's Frankie got left behind at the wedding." —Time

On a personal note, this is my third reading of To Kill a Mockingbird and with each new reading I am captivated all over again as if I am reading it for the very first time. To Kill A Mockingbird is a novel about race, childhood and community in the American South. Scout and her brother Jem live with their father Atticus Finch, an attorney. Scout, Jem and their friend Dill are obsessed with the whereabouts of their strange neighbor Boo Radley, who has not come out of his house for years. The children spend their days acting out scenarios of Boo Radley’s behavior. Their life however, took a turn when their father was appointed to defend the black man accused of raping a white girl. The children were finally able to meet Boo Radley, but through circumstances, they had never imagined... Stay tuned during the entire month of May for discussion questions and feel free to comment with your thoughts on To Kill a Mockingbird at any time!