Book Clubs

INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE
With Sarah McNally

"This is what keeps me coming back to Elizabeth Bowen and in particular to The Death of the Heart. It’s brutality. It’s ambiguity. It’s utter lack of repentance. And yet, it is not a book without heart"

- Charlotte McGuinn Freeman for The Rumpus on Elizabeth Bowen's Death of the Heart.

"She stands revealed, in The White Album, as a human being who has managed to gouge another book out of herself, rather than as a writer who gets her living done on the side, or between the lines. The result is a volatile, occasionally brilliant, distinctly female contribution to the new New Journalism, diffident and imperious by turns, intimate yet categorical, self-effacingly listless and at the same time often subtly self-serving. She can still find her own perfect pitch for long stretches, and she has an almost embarrassingly sharp ear and unblinking eye for the Californian inanity."

- Martin Amis for The London Review of Books on Joan Didion's The White Album.

POETRY
With Brigid Brine

"As we look back over a career of some 55 years and two dozen books, we have to question whether anyone, in any language, has ever so taken hold of the necks of plain words, plain language, and wrung from them, again and again, so very much more than they intended, so very much more than we’d have thought them capable of producing."

-James Sallis for The Boston Review on Eugene Guillevic, author of Art Poétique.

This month, the book club will be discussing the magic of the line in Guillevic's book. How does he use the line, and how is it different than in the poetry of Mallarmé or Baudelaire? 

"This book doesn’t represent revolution as a general concept, but it follows the specific revolutions we have experienced in our conversations with one another, in our friendships and communities, and with the writers we love."

- From Revolution: A Reader.

Please read the introduction and the essays between p. 487 and p. 632.

"The work of the playwright Thomas Bradshaw has been described as depicting 'life with all the boring parts taken out.' It might also be described as life with all the ghastly extremes — incest, pedophilia, rape, racially motivated murder —added back in, and depicted in a deadpan style that has prompted both big laughs and angry walkouts."

- Jennifer Schuessler for The New York Times on Thomas Bradshaw's Mary.

"This book predicted a new wave in Latin American: the chavist, cristinist and mujiconga literature"

-Javier Molea on La literatura nazi en America

SMALL BUSINESS
With Holly Howard

" Perfectly timed and beautifully weighted...a refreshing change after years of reading angry indictments of fallen corporate idols...an excellent book."

- Andrew Hill for The Financial Times on Adam Grant's Give and Take.