September Book Clubs

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

August Book Clubs

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.

Memorial Day Weekend at Community Bookstore

If you’re not familiar with Community Bookstore‘s backyard, drop everything and get down there immediately. It might just be the quietest place in Brooklyn. Plus, you might just see a few turtles.

Follow Community Bookstore on Twitter at @CommunityBkstr, find them on Facebook, and they’re also on Tumblr. They’re located at 143 Seventh Avenue in Park Slope.

Books bought today

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories by Margaret Drabble
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.

My Father and Myself by J.R. Ackerley

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.