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.
SEPTEMBER
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1ST
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
7pm FICTION BOOK CLUB: THE MEMBRANES, by Chi Ta-Wei, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich
[buy it here]
It is the late twenty-first century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she's too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city's best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality.
First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes--heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies--into a sensitive portrait of one young woman's quest for self-understanding. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans themes. The Membranes reveals the diversity and originality of contemporary speculative fiction in Chinese, exploring gender and sexuality, technological domination, and regimes of capital, all while applying an unflinching self-reflexivity to the reader's own role. Ari Larissa Heinrich's translation brings Chi's hybrid punk sensibility to all readers interested in books that test the limits of where speculative fiction can go.
8pm NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: SLOPPY; OR DOING IT ALL WRONG, by Rax King
[buy it here]
With Rax King's trademark blend of irreverent humor and heartfelt honesty comes a new collection of personal essays unpacking bad behavior. Sloppy explores sobriety, begrudging self-improvement, and the habits we cling to with clenched fists.
In "Proud Alcoholic Stock," King examines her parents' unwavering dedication to 12 step programs and the texture her family history has lent to her own sobriety. "Shoplifting from Brandy Melville" is a lighthearted look at, what else?, shoplifting from Brandy Melville--one of her few remaining indulgences now that she doesn't drink. King writes about her overspending and temper control issues as well as her poorly managed mental health. These seventeen essays capture the personal and generational vices that make us who we are. From being a crummy waitress to using uppers to force friendships, from obsessing over the Neopets forums to lying for no discernable reason, these essays approach bad habits with emotional intelligence, kindness and--most importantly--humor.
OCTOBER
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29th
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
7pm FICTION BOOK CLUB: SPEEDBOAT, by Renata Adler
[buy it here]
Winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.
When Speedboat burst on the scene in the late '70s it was like nothing readers had encountered before. It seemed to disregard the rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease. Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind. Above all, there was its voice, ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it.
A touchstone over the years for writers as different as David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Hardwick, Speedboat returns to enthrall a new generation of readers.
8pm NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: ANIMAL STORIES, by Kate Zambreno
[buy it here]
From a writer who has "invented a new form" (Annie Ernaux), an exploration of mortality, alienation, boredom, surveillance, and how we regard ourselves among the animals.
Animal Stories begins with Kate Zambreno's visit to the monkey house at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where one stark tree "seems to be the stage design for a simian production of Waiting for Godot." But who are the players and who is the audience, and can they recognize each other?
What follows is a series of reports from the deep strangeness of the zoo, a space that is "more often than not deeply sad, an odd choice for regular pilgrimages of fun." Amid excursions with their young children, Zambreno turns to Garry Winogrand's photographs and John Berger's writings on animals, reshaping the spectator as the subject to decode our complex "zoo feelings"--what we project, and what we refuse to see. Then, in the "Kafka system" that dovetails with these zoo studies, Zambreno thinks through the notebooks and animal stories of a writer known for playing at the threshold between species, continuing their investigation into the false divide between human and animal.
Drawing on forms including reports, essays, journals, and stories, Zambreno renders visible the enclosures we construct and the ones we occupy ourselves.
NOVEMBER - we're taking a little break, no book club in November!
DECEMBER
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 17TH
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
7pm FICTION BOOK CLUB: NYMPH, by Stephanie LaCava
[buy it here]
A thriller examining violence, through its subversion, and a singular love story
Not yet thirty, Bathory has assembled a peculiar résumé model, sex worker, linguist, Latin scholar, and assassin. The last of these has been the family trade for generations. Growing up, Bathory, her mother, and her father made an isolated, strange, and loving -- if very unusual -- family unit. Her lonely childhood games mimicked spycraft and wet-work, while her parents watched and shared their arcane theories about love and death.
As a student in New York, her life changes on accepting a job at a dilapidated card shop in Manhattan. This is a front for an agency that allows her to put her inherited skills to use while pursuing romance in the city.
However, steering clear of attachment is as dangerous as anything else she does and means sidestepping a certain alluring figure from her father's past. She is equally intent on dying young, a less difficult proposition given her heritage, the company she keeps -- call girls, conflicted cops, trustfund hoodlums -- and the people pursuing her.
Will Bathory escape both fate and family, or does satisfaction and salvation lie only in their embrace?
8pm NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF H. LAN THAO LAM by Lana Lim
[buy it here]
Situated between memoir, social criticism, and conceptual art, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam is an incisive response to a modernist classic and an affecting exploration of the poetics and politics of our times.
In her 1933 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein invented a new literary form by narrating her own story from the perspective of her partner, blurring the lines between portrait and self-portrait. Almost a century later, experimental filmmaker and artist Lana Lin has resurrected Stein's project to tell a different story of queer love, life, and artistic collaboration.
At heart a candid chronicle of her partner Lan Thao's life journey from Việt Nam during the war, and her own troubled history as a gender-queer Taiwanese American, Lin draws in subjects as varied as photography, cancer, tropical fruit, 9/11, and Eve Sedgwick's eyeglasses, weaving an intimate landscape of living that is also a critical investigation of race and gender.