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!
AUGUST
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26th
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
7pm FICTION BOOK CLUB: A LEOPARD-SKIN HAT by Anne Serre
[buy it here]
A Leopard-Skin Hat may be the French writer Anne Serre's most moving novel yet. Hailed in Le Point as a "masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance," it is the story of an intense friendship between "the Narrator" and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator's loving and anguished attachment to her. Anne Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel. Written in the aftermath of the death of the author's little sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell, written in Anne Serre's signature style.
8pm NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: THE EVOLUTION OF FIRE - ESSAYS ON CRISIS AND BECOMING, by Angela Pelster
"The Evolution of Fire is stunningly written--vivid in imagery, in the braiding together of language, and in the honoring of every person it shines a light on."--Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year
From the celebrated author of Limber, a luminous collection of essays about crisis, hope, and the decision to resist or embrace evolution--a book about time, for our time.
Crisis is an agent of evolution, and Angela Pelster knows what it means to evolve. As a child, she burned grass to keep weeds at bay and watched tadpoles transform. She basked in the warmth of her father's love but was burned by his rage, and she witnessed a sudden, unnamable change occur in her older sister after an encounter with a stranger in a white van. In adulthood, she survived the explosion of her marriage, the destruction of her burning home, and a year spent as the single mother of a toddler without a home of their own. And like us all, she has weathered the upheaval of our current atmosphere--political instability, climate change, mass extinction.
But in spite of the world's violence, Pelster manages to remain open to its beauty, deciding not to resist change, but to give herself over to it and let evolution make her into a new animal. She plumbs the depths of ancestral knowledge to uncover the scale of our ancient capacity for adaptation, from humankind's early harnessing of fire to the grandmothers responsible for our continued existence.
Meditative and curious, pulsing with fascination, fear, and the untamable human spirit, The Evolution of Fire contemplates who we are now and what we still might become.
SEPTEMBER
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30th
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
7pm FICTION BOOK CLUB: HELEN OF NOWHERE by Makenna Goodman
[buy it here]
**longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize**
An electrifying novel about the delights and dangers of starting over.
In the middle of the countryside, a realtor is showing a disgraced professor around an idyllic house. She speaks not only about the home's many wonderful qualities but about its previous owner, the mystifying Helen, whose presence still seems to suffuse every fixture. Through hearing stories of Helen's chosen way of living, the man begins to see that his own story is not actually over--rather, he is being offered a chance to buy his way into the simple life, close to the land, that's always been out of reach to him. But as evening fades into black, he will learn that the asking price may be much higher, and stranger, than anticipated.
Philosophically and formally adventurous, at once intimate and cosmic in scope, Helen of Nowhere asks: What must we give up in exchange for true happiness?
8pm NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: DOG DAYS by Emily LaBarge
A NEW YORK TIMES AND LITERARY HUB MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK
Dog Days unfolds in the long shadow of freak violence--where language stammers, time loops, and the body remembers what the mind can't.
"An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous and totally original."--Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City
In 2009, Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage while on vacation. A crocheted blanket was placed over her head while Mrs. Doubtfire and "Agnus Dei" played on repeat.
In the years that follow, a therapist encourages her to lie in exactly the same position, "just like how it happened, for as long as it happened, and for as long as it takes until the pain comes out"--otherwise it will never leave. She tries to find "the good story" neat, polite, reassuring. But what happens to the things the good story leaves out?
A high-voltage synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory--drawing upon film and writing from Mulholland Drive to It's a Wonderful Life, Virginia Woolf to Janet Malcolm--Dog Days writes into this question. How do language and institutions constrain and distort our understanding of trauma, violence, and care? How might we write otherwise, telling a story, and its aftermath, on our own terms? The result is not only a prose work but also a practice: an insistence on more radical, more complex forms of engagement, a search for the place where writing becomes a way of surviving.