Our book club meets monthly and is open to anyone who'd like to join. There is no need to reserve a spot or even buy the book from us, simply show up prepared to discuss the book on the night of the meeting.
JANUARY
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28TH
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
7pm FICTION BOOK CLUB: GRAND RAPIDS, by Nathasha Stagg
[buy it here]
A new novel from the celebrated author of Surveys, set in the Michigan suburbs of the early 2000s.
Installed alongside the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, Alexander Calder's public sculpture La Grande Vitesse has come to symbolize the city. Tess moves there from Ypsilanti, Michigan in 2001--the same year that her mother dies, when everything begins to move, for her, in slow motion. Thrust into adolescence nearly rudderless, fifteen-year-old Tess is intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. A decade later, inspired by diary entries and TV reruns, she remembers this summer in the suburbs as the one that redefined her. Its echoes of death are frozen in time like the waves represented in the Calder sculpture or the concrete steps leading down to the churning river. She comes to see Grand Rapids as a collection of architecture and emblems, another home to which she cannot return.
8pm NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: DEAD WEIGHT; ESSAYS ON HUNGER AND HARM, by Emmeline Clein
[buy it here]
A personal and cultural look at the dark underbelly of Western beauty standards and the lethal culture of disordered eating they’ve wrought
“An authoritative, generous, and persuasive debut that I wish I could go back in time and gift to my teenage self.”—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood
In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein recounts her struggle with disordered eating alongside the stories of other women: historical figures, pop culture celebrities, and the girls she’s known and loved. Through the story of her own sickness, the raw recollections of interview subjects, and dispatches from social media rabbit holes, Clein challenges stereotypes and renders statistics and science deeply personal and urgent. From her first encounters with icons of the thin ideal to her years ricocheting between hunger and bingeing, from the pro-anorexia blog that unexpectedly saved someone’s life to the residential treatment centers that make so many people sicker, from a wrenching elegy for those who didn’t survive to a manifesto for sisterhood, solidarity, and recovery, Clein uncovers girlhood’s appetites and injuries to reveal the economic, cultural, and political history of an epidemic.
Dead Weight makes the case that we are faced with a culture of suppression, self-denial, and self-harm, an insidious, pervasive, and dangerous American cult of femininity rooted in racism and misogyny. Tracing the medical and cultural histories of anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder and investigating the recent rise of orthorexia, Clein reveals the economic conditions underpinning diet culture, and grapples with the ways today’s feminism can be complicit in propping up the fetish of self-shrinking.
Drawing on a kaleidoscopic array of sources—from cult classic films like Jennifer’s Body to the aughts-era Tumblrverse, the writing of Simone Weil, Chris Kraus, and Anne Boyer to the medieval canon of anorexic saints—Clein calls for a feminism that doesn’t compel women to shrink their bodies to increase their value, urging radical acceptance of all our appetites instead: for food, connection, and love. A sharp, perceptive, and revelatory polemic about the external forces that shape our lives, Dead Weight is electrifying, unapologetically bold, and fiercely compassionate.
FEBRUARY
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25TH
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
7pm FICTION BOOK CLUB: PANDORA, by Ana Paula Pacheco, translated by Julia Sanches (Providence local!)
[buy it here]
Confined to her apartment, a professor falls into an unlikely romance--with a pangolin.
Ana, a literature professor, plans her remote classes while confined to her apartment during lockdown. Her lover, Alice, has died of Covid. In her place are a series of animals that demand Ana's care and attention: an overbearing pangolin, a swarm of insects, a giant bat.
Amid changes in medication and fraught faculty meetings, Ana's grip on reality loosens. She begins to devise a syllabus on the financialization of art and life, posing questions about labor and intimacy she will use her own body to answer. Her apartment fills with creatures, her teaching slides into absurd allegory, and her sense of what is real, permissible, or politically legible fractures.
Equal parts tender and grotesque, Pandora is a hallucinatory portrait of a mind and a world in collapse, a razor-sharp meditation on desire, delusion, and the absurd endurance of the human.
8pm NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: UNCANNY VALLEY GIRLS: Essays on Horror, Survical, and Love, by Zefyr Lisowski
[buy it here]
An Electric Literature Best Nonfiction Book of the Year - A them Best LGBTQ+ Book of the Year - A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year - An Autostraddle Most Anticipated October Read - A BookRiot Most Anticipated Queer Book of the Year
"In these extraordinary essays, Lisowski reads the entrails of her life like a witch and invites you along for the ride. How could you say no?" --Carmen Maria Machado
From Lambda Award-winning poet Zefyr Lisowski, a sharply personal and expansive memoir-in-essays dedicated to the strange and absurd beauty of horror films, exploring the complications of gender, the insidiousness of class ascension, and the latent violence hidden in our own uncanny reflections.
This is how it worked: first I loved them, and then I loved myself.
At twenty-seven, poet Zefyr Lisowski found herself in the place she feared most: a locked psych ward. While inside, she turned to horror movies--her deepest, most constant comfort.
Rather than disturb, scary movies have always provided solace and connection for Lisowski, as they do many others--offering a vision of a world filled equally with beauty and pain, and a reason to reach out to others and hold them tight. After all, as Lisowski argues, what terrifies us most about these movies is our own uncanny reflection--and at the root of that fear, a desperate desire to love and be loved.
In these wide-ranging essays, Lisowski weaves theory and memoir into nuanced critiques of films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Saint Maud. From fears about sickness and disability, to trans narratives and the predator/victim complex, to the struggle to live in a world that wants you dead, she explores horror's reciprocal impact on our culture and--by extension--our lives. Through it all, Lisowski lays bare her own complex biography--spanning from a trans childhood in the South to the sweaty dancefloors of Brooklyn--and the family, friends, and lovers that have bloomed with her into the present.
Deeply felt, blood-spattered, and brimming with care and wonder, Uncanny Valley Girls thrusts this seasoned poet to centerstage.