The Big Read at Kansas City Public Library

Lectures, panel discussions, movie screenings, and book groups, are among the programming highlights scheduled for the community-wide The Big Read celebration of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms in Kansas City during October-November 2007.

This fall’s The Big Read aims to encourage Kansas Citians to read, enjoy, contemplate, and discuss Hemingway’s landmark novel of love and war on the Italian Front during the First World War. The program period coincides with the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Caporetto, a devastating Italian defeat that served as a climactic moment in A Farewell to Arms. More than 500 free paperback copies of A Farewell to Arms will be distributed to interested participants.

Funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kansas City’s Big Read is being developed by a consortium comprising Park University, the Kansas City Public Library, and the National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial. The Big Read is designed to restore reading to the center of American culture and encourage reading for pleasure and enlightenment. The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and Arts Midwest.

For more information, contact the Kansas City Public Library at 816.701.3402 or check out the links on the left.