Get started now, these book clubs for August are coming up fast!
WORD Fiction Book Club
Saturday, August 4, 12pm
Book: Zombie by J.R. Angelella
Conversation with author and editor
Jeremy is fourteen, obsessed with zombie flicks, and struggling at school and at home. His dad disappears every night, he’s probably going to get his butt kicked weekly (if not daily) by the local jock brigade, and every time he talks to the girl of his dreams he gets a nosebleed. Angelella has written a truly surprising, frequently sinister, and very clever YA novel. 10% off.
Bluestockings Feminist Book Club
Sunday, August 5 at 2:30pm
Book: Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall
The Feminist Book Club reads and discusses feminism. We make no claims to any particular feminist platform. Rather, we rely on feminism(s). We read theoretical texts, literature and primary works. All are welcome regardless of gender, political persuasion, and familiarity. We meet on the first Sunday each month. For more information, email feministbookclubnyc@gmail.com.
McNally Jackson International Literature Book Club
Monday, August 6, 7pm (downstairs)
Book: Ghosts by Cesar Aira
On a building site of a new, luxury apartment building, visitors looked up at the strange, irregular form of the water tank that crowned the edifice, and the big parabolic dish that would supply television images to all the floors. On the edge of the dish, a sharp metallic edge on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the midday sun; no one saw them, of course. from GhostsGhosts is about a construction worker’s family squatting on a building site. They all see large and handsome ghosts around their quarters, but the teenage daughter is the most curious. Her questions about them become more and more heartfelt until the story reaches a critical, chilling moment when the mother realizes that her daughter’s life hangs in the balance. 10% off.
McNally Jackson Essay Book Club
Monday, August 6, 7pm (travel section)
Book: On Being Blue William Gass
WORD Classics Book Club
Saturday, August 11, 12pm
Book: Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky: A London Trilogy by Susanna Moore
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky is perhaps the most British book ever written. From the man who brought you Gaslight, a sort-of trilogy full of characters worth loving and hating in equal measure. Due to the length of this book, we’ll devote two discussions to it. This meet up will be devoted to the second part.
WORD Music Writing Book Club with Tobias Carroll
Saturday, August 11, 3pm
Book: The Chitlin’ Circuit: And the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll by Preston Lauterbach
Preston Lauterbach’s The Chitlin’ Circuit is an important history of the network of venues safe for Black performers from the 19th century through the 1960s, which provided space for many American popular musics. 10% off leading up to discussion!
Community Bookstore Even Cleveland Book Club
Monday, August 13, 7pm
Book: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
An audacious revision of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilate, The Master and Margarita is recognized as one of the essential classics of modern Russian literature. For more information visit the dedicated blog for the club.
Community Bookstore Small Press Book Club
Tuesday, August 14, 7pm
Book: The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
The post-office girl is Christine, who looks after her ailing mother and toils in a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after the Great War. One afternoon, as she is dozing among the official forms and stamps, a telegraph arrives addressed to her. It is from her rich aunt, who lives in America and writes requesting that Christine join her and her husband in a Swiss Alpine resort. After a dizzying train ride, Christine finds herself at the top of the world, enjoying a life of privilege that she had never imagined.
The BookCourt Fiction Book Club
Wednesday, August 15, 7pm
The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson
Annie and Buster Fang have spent most of their adult lives trying to distance themselves from their famous artist parents, Caleb and Camille. But when a bad economy and a few bad personal decisions converge, the two siblings have nowhere to turn but their family home.
Bluestockings Radical Librarians Meetup
Sunday, August 19th, 2pm
Book: Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century by Bly and Wooten
The Radical Librarians Book Club is a group of aspiring librarians, current librarians, and other folks who are invested in re-envisioning the traditional library. We seek to examine issues of librarianship from a radical, politically-focused perspective, and build community within the field. The Radical Librarians meet every third Sunday. August’s text is “Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century,” edited by Lyz Bly and Kelly Wooten.
Greenlight Fiction Book Group
Tuesday, August 21, 7:30pm
Book: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
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 August the book group will read and discuss The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, which won the 2008 Man Booker Prize. The white tiger of this novel is Balram Halwai, a poor Indian villager whose great ambition leads him to the zenith of Indian business culture: the world of the Bangalore entrepreneur. On the occasion of the president of China’s impending trip to Bangalore, Balram writes a letter to him describing his own transformation and his experience as driver and servant to a wealthy Indian family, which he thinks exemplifies the contradictions and complications of Indian society. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel was an international publishing sensation and the winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2008.
WORD Wodehouse Book Club
Sunday, August 26, 3pm
Leave It to Psmith by P. G. Wodehouse
Ronald Psmith (the p is silent, as in pshrimp) is always willing to help a damsel in distress. So when he sees Eve Halliday without an umbrella during a downpour, he nobly offers her an umbrella, even though it s one he picks out of the Drone Club s umbrella rack. Psmith is so besotted with Eve that, when Lord Emsworth, her new boss, mistakes him for Ralston McTodd, a poet, Psmith pretends to be him so he can make his way to Blandings Castle and woo her. And so the farce begins: criminals disguised as poets with a plan to steal a priceless diamond necklace, a secretary who throws flower pots through windows, and a nighttime heist that ends in gunplay. How will everything be sorted out? Leave it to Psmith.
On Wednesday, June 27th at McNally Jackson, Brooklyn authors and long-time friends Matt Dojny and John Wray kicked off Book Boroughing’s new literary series, “Literary BFFs,” a conversation between friends about books and the writing life.
Don’t delay, there are some great book club reads for July at your local indie. In date order:
If you’re not familiar with 
Margaret Drabble’s novels have illuminated the past fifty years, especially the changing lives of women, like no others. Yet her short fiction has its own unique brilliance. Her penetrating evocations of character and place, her wide-ranging curiosity, her sense of irony–all are on display here, in stories that explore marriage, female friendships, the English tourist abroad, love affairs with houses, peace demonstrations, gin and tonics, cultural TV programs, in stories that are perceptive, sharp, and funny. With an introduction by the Spanish academic Jose Fernandez that places the stories in the context of her life and her novels, this collection is a wonderful recapitulation of a masterly career.
When his father died, J. R. Ackerley was shocked to discover that he had led a secret life. And after Ackerley himself died, he left a surprise of his own–this coolly considered, unsparingly honest account of his quest to find out the whole truth about the man who had always eluded him in life. But Ackerley’s pursuit of his father is also an exploration of the self, making “My Father and Myself” a pioneering record, at once sexually explicit and emotionally charged, of life as a gay man. This witty, sorrowful, and beautiful book is a classic of twentieth-century memoir.
Yesterday, Book Boroughing swung by the 
The store is known for its excellent selection of cultural and political theory titles that you probably won’t find elsewhere.
They have a great selection of poetry titles, taking up two book cases. You can also find literary journals, offbeat magazines, and self published zines.
Their bargain table in the back is awesome.
Ismet Prcic's Shards: One of 
Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City: One of the things I like best about St. Mark's is the bargain book section in the back, where you can pick up international editions of books like Jonathan Lethem's novel Chronic City at a fraction of their original price.
Gabrielle is currently reading The Speed Chronicles, a collection of essays and short stories by a range of authors about speed — in all its varied forms. Really incredible writing. Brooklyn’s Tao Lin has written her favorite story so far with Jerry Stahl coming in at a close second.