CNY Reads - The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

Poetry & Essay Contest Winners Announced!

CNY Reads focuses on themes related to each title that is chosen, and works to get the community involved in exploring these themes. The themes for The Kite Runner are:

Immigration
Islam
The Morality of Silence

Click here to read a listserv discussion about the Morality of Silence, and please join us with your thoughts and comments by e-mailing us at: cnyreads@yahoo.com. Any submitted discussions will be regularly previewed and posted by a CNY Reads moderator.

About The Author

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan where his mother taught Farsi and history in a high school and his father worked for the embassy. In 1980, after the 1978 coup by pro-Soviet officers and the subsequent Soviet invasion, the family was granted political asylum in the United States. Hosseini went on to earn his medical degree from the University of California, and has been practicing internal medicine since 1996. He lives in northern California, where he is a physician, but his first love is, and always has been, writing.

The Kite Runner is his first novel.

For more information about Hosseini, try these websites:

Meet the Writers: Khaled Hosseini [Barnes & Noble]
@uthors On the Web
Khalad Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner [Dr. Hosseini's website]

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Partial image from book cover of the Kite Runner

About the Book

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner tells a sweeping story of family, love, and friendship against a backdrop of history that has not been told in fiction before, bringing to mind the large canvases of the Russian writers of the nineteenth century. But just as it is old-fashioned in its narration, it is contemporary in its subject—the devastating history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years. As emotionally gripping as it is tender, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful debut.
- Penguin Group (USA) Publisher's Review: see the full page here.

For addition book reviews:

Book Review at Bookpage.com
Curled Up with a Good Book
MostlyFiction.com
Published by: Riverhead Trade Books [Penguin Group, USA]

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Community Information

Onondaga County Public Library Catalog

Onondaga County Public Library's Press Release

Syracuse University's Press Release

Syracuse University's Schedule of Events [search by Kite Runner, Shared Reading, or CNY Reads]

Syracuse University's Shared Reading Program

Schedule of Events

Criteria for Book Selection

Other nominees for 2006/2007

Suggest a Book for 2007/2008

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Additional Resources

Teaching Materials: Includes suggested additional reading, The Kite Runner character lists, discussion questions, vocabulary, timeline, and Afghanistan history.

Research Guide [Provided by Syracuse University Shared Reading Program & Syracuse University Library]

Additional formats of The Kite Runner

Onondaga County Public Library Catalog

Discussion Questions [Provided by Penguin Books]

How to Start a Book Club [Provided by Penguin Books]

Afghanistan Recipes

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CNY Reads The Kite Runner Contests

Writing Contest [pdf]
[Please NOTE: The Contest Deadline has been moved back to March 15, 2007]

Poetry Contest [pdf]
[Please NOTE: The Contest Deadline has been moved back to March 15, 2007]

Last Updated: February 10, 2009