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. We do ask that participants please order a drink and/or snack from the bar!
MARCH
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25TH
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
7pm FICTION BOOK CLUB: SEA, POISON, by Caren Beilin
[buy it here]
Cumin Baleen is a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia—this city of hospitals—who works at the upscale grocery Sea & Poison and is navigating the onset of an autoimmune condition. To start a medication that may help, an eye exam is required and this leads to a nightmarish laser eye surgery. The laser shoots into her brain, making her language spare and her sentences clause-less, a vexing constraint that stalls her book on gynecological malpractice: she wants others, in the realm of our for-profit medical industry that “renders the Hippocratic Oath its opposite,” to see poison.
Meanwhile, Cumin is kicked out of her boyfriend Mari’s studio after he falls for Janine, their landlord, and starts renting a closet in Maron’s bedroom— polyamorous Maron who is hooking up with Alix, whom Cumin lusts after. Disheveled from medicines and medical scams, Cumin declares, “I don’t know what to say, I’m saying I have a cracked appearance. It’s not a pity party, it’s a character sketch. Insofar as you’ll need to be looking at me, that your mind should fill me up with its own swaying cognitive and toxic reeds if we are to do this, your imagination should touch me with its ridiculous poison.”
Caren Beilin’s hypnotic and fractured story is at once an homage to Shusaku Endo’s terrifying novel of human vivisection The Sea and Poison and the spirit of Oulipo, the pioneering French writing group that sought new literary potential through constraints.
8pm NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: HELLO STRANGER: Musings on Modern Intimacies by Manuel Betancourt
[buy it here]
Witty and winkingly playful, Manuel Betancourt's Hello Stranger explores modern queer romance and the expansive possibilities of ephemeral intimacies
"Hello stranger." As an opening line, you really can't ask for better.
Hello Stranger is a book about chance encounters--at a bar, through social media, in a bathhouse--and what a stranger can reveal about who we are and who we could still yet be. A stranger, after all, is a site of endless possibilities.
As Manuel Betancourt looks back on his past relationships, he turns to characters and narratives that helped him question notions of what monogamy and coupledom (and relationships and marriage) can and should look like. From films like Before Sunrise and Cruising to the poetry of Frank O'Hara and the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, Betancourt uses pop culture to make sense of the alluring prospect of forging intimacies with strangers--even, or especially, the strangers within ourselves.
At once a personal excavation and a broad cultural critique, Betancourt grapples with everything from online sexting and real-life cruising to divorces and throuples. Hello Stranger examines the intimacies we crave, value, and oftentimes destroy with rote familiarity.
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APRIL
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29TH
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
7pm FICTION BOOK CLUB: A GORGEOUS EXCITEMENT, by Cynthia Weiner
[buy it here]
One young woman's summer of infinite possibility takes a turn she never saw coming in "this 1980s coming-of-age tale [that's] chillingly compelling. Get ready to be transported."--People (Best Books of the Month)
"I haven't felt this kind of excitement reading a story set in the '80s since I first discovered Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Bret Easton Ellis."--Margarita Montimore, bestselling author of Oona Out of Order
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, Kirkus Reviews, CrimeReads
There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother's depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible--when her mother isn't lying in bed for days, she's lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan's, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn't help that she's Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents' medicine cabinet.
Flanagan's is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed. Every girl wants to sleep with him and every guy wants to be him. After she's introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?
Freud called cocaine "a gorgeous excitement," but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.
8pm NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: FASCIST YOGA: Grifters, Occulists, White Supremacists, and the New Order in Wellness by Stewart Home
[buy it here]
"Namaste, fascists! An original and entertaining analysis of the dubious origins of the Western middle class's favourite postural exercise" - The Times
"A hilarious grenade thrown at platitudes & the knit-your-own yoghurt brigade. Home lifts the magic carpet to reveal the tasteless chicanery." - The Scotsman
"Western yoga existed in uncomfortably close proximity to various strands of extreme right-wing thought ... [Home's] writing about yoga is intended less as an academic study than as an attempt to educate practitioners about the influence of fascism on their culture" - New York Review of Books
"A serious treatise on a zeitgeisty topic. To the man who may be Britain's most avant-garde writer and artist, yoga is a swindle that dupes the well-meaning middle classes. It's also a breeding ground for fascists. It isn't even particularly good for you." - The Telegraph
"A riveting work for readers interested in yoga and right-wing movements." - Library Journal
The practice of yoga promises peace, self-realisation and release, thanks to the power of its 'mystic' Indian origins. But what if this is just hype? In Fascist Yoga, Stewart Home sweeps away the half-truths to tell a new origin story of the world's first modern yogi - a Californian escapologist who added some Hindu fairy dust to gym and circus exercises.
Ever since, the world of yoga has been full of grifters, occultists and white supremacists, all out to exploit and recruit via the medium of exercise. From cult leaders and brainwashed followers to TV celebrities and fake gurus, the story of yoga has involved some of the strangest currents of humanity.
In this new exposé, Stewart Home shows that nothing is sacred.
Stewart Home is a legend of counterculture. He is an artist, filmmaker, pamphleteer, art historian and activist, and the author of countless pulp fictions, including most recently Art School Orgy and She's My Witch. He regularly performs to audiences across the world.