Small Press fiction book club

Small Press Book Club will be meeting on Tuesday, January 28th, at 7 pm. We will be reading Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt. It is published by Nightboat Books, a nonprofit “that seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries, by publishing books rich with poignancy, intelligence and risk.”

About the book:

Newly discovered in the author's archives and published for the first time in the UK in 2023, this portrait of queer, working class London drifts from coffee shop to house party, in search of the next tryst.
Leda is lost. He spends his days steeped in ennui, watching the hours pass, waiting for the night to arrive. Trysts in the rubble of a bombsite follow hours spent in bed with near strangers, as Leda seeks out intimacy in unlikely places. Semi-homeless and estranged from his family of origin, he relies on the support of his chosen one: a community of older gay men and divorced women who feed and clothe him, gently encouraging him to find a foothold in a society which excludes him at every turn. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession--one which sends him spiraling into self-destruction. Pre-dating the British Sexual Offences Act of 1967, Love Leda was first published in 2023 in the UK. This long lost novel is a portrait of London's Soho that is now lost, an important document of queer working-class life from a voice long overlooked.

Small Press Book Club will be meeting on Thursday, February 27th, at 7 pm. We will be reading Children of the Ghetto by Elias Khoury, translated by Humphrey Davies. It is published by Archipelago Books, a nonprofit press committed to publishing exceptional translations of classic and contemporary world literature.

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.