Small Press fiction book club
Small presses publish some of the best, most exciting, and most innovative fiction today. In this book club we’ll read books from independent publishing houses where risks are being taken and new voices discovered. A different small press will be featured each month, and members can vote on what to read next. We'll read books from Archipelago, Feminist Press, Two Dollar Radio, Other Press, Verso, Tin House, and more.
You can find some of Meg’s staff picks here.
Small Press Book Club will be meeting on Thursday, April 24th, at 7 pm. We will be reading Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury, translated by Humphrey Davies. It is published by Archipelago Books, a non-profit press focused on promoting cross-cultural exchange through international literature in translation since 2003
About the book:
Lit by the sublime beauty and tragedy of classical Arabic poetry, a Palestinian falafel seller in New York sets out to shape fragments of his family history
Weaving history, memory, and poetry, this unforgettable novel—and the 1st book in a trilogy—provides a sprawling memorial to the Nakba and the strangled lives left in its wake.
Long exiled in New York, Palestinian ex-pat Adam Dannoun thought he knew himself. But an encounter with Blind Mahmoud, a father figure from his childhood, changes everything. It is when Adam encounters his former teacher that Adam discovers the story he must tell.
Ma’moun’s testimony brings Adam back to the first years of his life in the ghetto of Lydia, in Palestine, where his family endured thirst, hunger, and terror in the aftermath of unspeakable horror.
With unmatched literary craft and empathy, Khoury peels away layers of lost stories and repressed memories to unveil Adam’s story.
Oscillating between two narrators—the self-reflexive "Elias Khoury" and Adam himself—Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam engages real (and invented) scholarly texts, Khoury’s own work, and Adam’s lost notebooks in an intertextual account of a life shadowed by atrocity.
Small Press Book Club will be meeting on Thursday, May 29th, at 7 pm. We will be reading We All Loved Cowboys by Carol Bensimon, published by Transit Books.
Transit Books is a nonprofit publisher of international and American literature, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founded in 2015, Transit Books is committed to the discovery and promotion of enduring works that carry readers across borders and communities. Transit authors have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN Translation Prize, and have been finalists for the National Book Award, the International Booker Prize, the National Translation Award, and more.
About the book:
"This short but profoundly moving novel by the young Brazilian writer is one of the finest explorations of love you will find anywhere this year."--John Freeman, The Boston Globe
After a falling out, Cora and Julia reunite for a long-planned road trip through Brazil. As they drive from town to town, the complications of their friendship resurface. By the end of the trip, they must decide what the future holds, in a queer, coming-of-age debut novel that has been celebrated in Brazil.
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