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!
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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.
MAY
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, MAY 27TH
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
7pm FICTION BOOK CLUB: CITY OF RATS, by Copi
[buy it here]
Life isn't easy for a Parisian rat. But Gouri is getting by: with his best friend Rakä, he's got a small business selling worms to pigeons, a cozy bachelor nest at the local florist, an--as spring blooms in the City of Lights--a budding love interest. But after a double date goes horribly wrong, Gouri and Rakä, along with the royal Rat Court--the princesses Iris and Catarina, and their hilariously unpredictable mother, the Queen of Rats--find themselves adrift on the Seine, accessories after the fact to a double homicide, using their new ally, a small human child, as a life raft. From there, the hijinks metastasize. French police collar the gang along with Mimile, a sadistic murderer who never remembers his crimes. But having escaped lock-up (from the cell they'd been tossed into with their arch-enemies, a snake and a terrier), they pay a visit to the God of Man (a homeless recluse hiding out in the Sainte-Chapelle), but then the giant Rat Devil makes his appearance, full of fiery flatulence and threatening cataclysm...
Told in a series of letters purportedly written in rat language and posted from Gouri to his former master, City of Rats is the second novel by French-Argentine exile, novelist, cartoonist, playwright, actor, and queer provocateur Copi to be translated into English and perhaps his most madcap work, an X-rated fable where his high-velocity prose smashes through societal taboos--moral, sexual, or otherwise--like a bullet train hitting a glass house. Whimsical, smutty, and surprisingly profound, City of Rats will leave no reader unscathed, and every reader awestruck.
8pm NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: HEALTH AND SAFETY; A Breakdown by Emily Witt
[buy it here]
WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE - A NEW YORKER, TIME, AND PITCHFORK BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex comes a memoir about drugs, techno, and New York City
"The first great book about what it was like to live through the Trump presidency"--Emily Gould, The Cut
In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.
In Health and Safety, Witt charts her immersion into New York City's dance music underground, where she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future, and all during an era of American delirium and dissolution. Sparing no one--least of all Witt herself--Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall.