Who
Chloe Cooper Jones is a writer and journalist, the author of Easy Beauty, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a professor of writing at Columbia. She was assigned Heart of Darkness twice before it made sense to her, and has taught it many times since.
The book
A sailor goes up the Congo to find a company man named Kurtz and comes back unable to say exactly what he saw. A hundred pages, three chapters, and a title nobody can pin to one heart or one darkness.
What you’ll come away with
A way to read the book’s ambiguity as the point rather than the problem, and a clear account of why a novel written at the height of empire could see through it.
