Monthly Archives: August 2012

September Book Clubs

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September book clubs are approaching fast. Get started now!

WORD Fiction Book Group
Saturday, September 1, 12pm
Book: Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe Valtat
Meet Aurorarama, the first in series chronicling the antics of the society of New Venice, high up in the Arctic. Debauchery, drugs, politics, high society, a zeppelin full of anarchists-for-hire, Eskimos: this book is truly weird and riotous. Jenn says, “It reads kind of like if Jane Austen had taken a ton of ‘shrooms and gotten lost in a snowstorm with the Marquis de Sade.”
10% off leading up to discussion!

WORD Classics Book Group
Saturday, September 8,12pm
Book: Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard by Arthur Conan Doyle
We’ll be finding out what Arthur Conan Doyle got up to after he killed off Sherlock Holmes and discussing Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard, the Napoleonic soldier you never knew you were missing. Bubble-pipes encouraged.
10% off leading up to discussion!

WORD Music Writing Book Group
Saturday, September 8, 3:00 pm
Book: Love Rock Revolution by Mark Baumgarten
We’ll be exploring the independent record labels that sprung up in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s and early 1990s via Mark Baumgarten’s Love Rock has Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music. K Records fostered some of independent music’s greatest artists, including Beat Happening, Built to Spill, Beck, Modest Mouse, and the Gossip. It has also galvanized the international pop underground, helped create the grunge scene that took over pop culture, and provided a launching pad for the riot grrrl movement that changed the role of women in music forever.
10% off leading up to discussion!

McNally Jackson International Literature Book Club
Monday, September 10th 7pm (downstairs)
Book: Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch.

McNally Jackson Essays Book Club
Monday, September 10th 7pm (travel section)
Book: T Fleishman’s Beauty, Syzygy

Community Bookstore Even Cleveland Book Club
Monday, September 10, 7pm
Book: The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham.

McNally Jackson Poetry Book Club
Wednesday, September 12, 7pm (travel section)
Book: John Ashbery’s translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations.
Please click here for the specific poems that will be addressed.

Community Bookstore Book Club
Wednesday, September 12, 7:30pm
Book: Underworld by Don DeLillo

The BookCourt Fiction Book Club
Wednesday Sep 12, 7:00PM
Book: Howards End by E. M. Forster

Greenlight Fiction Book Group
Tuesday, September 18, 7:30pm
Book: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
Led by former Greenlight staffer Natalie and co-owner Jessica, this book group discusses paperback fiction; in 2012, the group is focusing on award winners and under-the-radar gems. For September, the book group will discuss Joseph O’Neill’s novelNetherland, winner of the 2009 Pen/Faulkner award for fiction. In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, and left alone after his English wife and son return to London, Hans van den Broek stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. As the two men share their vastly different experiences of contemporary immigrant life in America, an unforgettable portrait emerges of an “other” New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality.

Community Bookstore Small Press Book Club
Tuesday, September, 25 at 7pm
Book: Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman

Book Shopping at McNally Jackson

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McNally Jackson is best known for its excellent selection of literary fiction, especially its many shelves devoted to translated literature where books are separated by the author’s country of origin. What isn’t as widely known is their mystery section located downstairs. Among the crime novels are some great noir titles. Here’s what caught our eye:

Gabrielle:

Ever since Melville House released Derek Raymond’s Factory Series, five crime novels set in Margaret Thatcher’s London, they’ve been on my must-read list. Whenever I see their orange covers with their awesome images, I grab them off the shelf, read the jacket copy, toss them from hand to hand, and hold them up for another look.

Until now, I’ve let myself get sidetracked by other titles but the tipping point came this weekend when, on the most recent episode of the Three Percent podcast, New Directions’ Publicity and Marketing Director, Tom Roberge, mentioned he’d just read the first in the series, He Died with His Eyes Open. He said they are the “darkest noir novels he’s ever read” and that the first one was “pretty fantastic.”

He Died with His Eyes Open is an “unflinching yet deeply compassionate portrait of a city plagued by poverty and perversion and a policeman who may be the only one who cares about the ‘people who don’t matter and who never did.’” (Melville House)

David:

When I was in college my favorite literary palate cleanser was American noir fiction, and when I tired of textbooks and classics I would dig into the works of Chandler, Hammett, and others.

These days I am just as likely to the read modern literary noir of authors like Laura Lippman, James Ellroy, and Megan Abbott, but my favorite crime writer has long been George Pelecanos. Stephen King agrees, and has called him “perhaps the greatest living American crime writer.”

The Cut is the first novel in a series that features Iraq war veteran Spero Lucas, a conflicted and unlicensed private detective drawn in the spare, stark prose that has become a Pelecanos trademark.