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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JUNE/JULY
BOTH BOOK CLUBS WILL BE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 1ST
Fiction will meet at 7pm
Nonfiction will meet at 8pm
7pm FICTION BOOK CLUB: PARADAIS by Fernanda Melchor, Translated by Sophie Hughes
[buy it here]
Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor—an attractive married woman and mother—while Polo dreams about quitting his awful job as the gated community’s gardener and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Faced with the impossibility of getting what they think they deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme.
Written in a thrilling torrent of prose by one of our most exciting new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society—fractured by issues of race, class, and violence—and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.
8pm NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB: BIBLIOPHOBIA, by Sarah Chihaya
Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect "Life Ruiners".
Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah's deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition, and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism, and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives?
Bibliophobia is an alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into texts such as Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.