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.
Current meeting schedule:
MAY
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, MAY 28TH!
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
FICTION BOOK CLUB: THE STEPDAUGHTER, by Caroline Blackwood
[buy it here]
A wicked stepmother finds her ideal prey in Carlone Blackwood's "quite brilliant" (The Times) debut.
A lavish Upper West Side apartment is the site of a familial cold war about to enter a phase of dangerous escalation.
J is a lonely woman without even the luxury of being alone. Her husband has fled to Paris with his latest flame, but he's left J not only with their own four-year-old daughter, Sally Ann, but with the sulky cake-mix addicted, thirteen-year-old Renata, a leftover from his previous marriage. The presence of a pert au pair, Monique, serves only to make J feel more isolated and self-conscious. What she'd like is someone to blame.
Writing letters in her head to imaginary friends, J delights in dwelling on the hapless Renata, who "invites a kind of cruelty." This is an invitation J fully intends to take up--and like so many stepmothers before her, she will find that wickedness, once indulged, is a difficult habit to kick. A mordant black splinter of a book, Caroline Blackwood's first novel stands as proof positive of her eternal mastery--and mockery--of the darkest depths of human feeling.
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NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: ON GIVING UP, by Adam Phillips
[buy it here]
From acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, a meditation on what we must give up to feel more alive.
To give up or not to give up?
The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple.
Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable.
There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment--an attempt to make a different future.
In On Giving Up, the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up and helps us to address the central question: What must we give up in order to feel more alive?
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JUNE
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25TH!
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
FICTION BOOK CLUB: THE PEPSI-COLA ADDICT, by June-Alison Gibbons
[buy it here]
The legendary lost novel in which fourteen-year-old Preston Wildey-King must choose between his all-consuming passion for Pepsi Cola and his love for schoolmate Peggy.
"He walked into the turbulent super market. There were people everywhere. His eyes swept over the shelves and stabilised on a large stack of Pepsi-colas. He could almost experience the cool fizzy liquid descending his parched throat."
Written by June-Alison Gibbons when she was only 16, The Pepsi Cola Addict is considered one of the great works of twentieth-century outsider literature. More than just a literary curiosity, however, this tale of a teenager whose passion for a well-known cola drink threatens to ruin his life is the uniquely vivid expression of a young woman trying to make sense of the confusing, often brutal world she in which found herself.
Published in 1982 by a vanity press who took 800 from its young author and gave her only a single book in return, it's thought that fewer than ten original copies still exist in the world.
Shortly after its publication, June-Alison and her sister Jennifer would become infamous as "The Silent Twins" and find themselves cruelly incarcerated for over a decade in Broadmoor Hospital. This author-approved edition makes June-Alison Gibbon's remarkable vision widely available for the first time.
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NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: MORNINGS WITHOUT MII, by Mayumi Inaba, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
[buy it here]
A beloved Japanese modern classic: a meditation on solitude, independence, writing, and life alongside a cat.
On a cool summer evening in 1977, Mayumi Inaba hears a forlorn cry carried by the breeze off Tokyo's Tamagawa River. She follows the sound to the riverbank and finds a newborn kitten only the size of her palm dangling from a fence, abandoned. Overcome by tender affection, she takes the cat back to the small apartment she shares with her husband and christens her Mii: so begins an ineffable bond.
Over the next twenty years, we follow Inaba, a poet and novelist by moonlight, as she pursues quiet, solitude, and a room of her own. Through it all, her cat, a fiercely independent creature in her own right, is her confidante and muse.
From the late Mayumi Inaba, a winner of the Kawabata Prize and the Tanizaki Prize, Mornings Without Mii is not just a love letter to companionship: it's a poignant, searching meditation on the forces that enable us to connect, to create, and to build a life.