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
Get started now, these book clubs for August are coming up fast!
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.










