Small Press fiction book club

Small Press will be meeting on Tuesday, April 30th, at 7 pm. We will be reading Kitchen Curse by Eka Kurniawan, translated by Annie Tucker, Benedict Anderson, Maggie Tiojakin, and Tiffany Tsao.

It is published by Verso Books: the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world, publishing one hundred books a year.

About the book:

Nominated for the Man Booker International, Eka Kurniawan brings his short stories into English for the first time.

Eka Kurniawan’s freewheeling imagination explores the turbulent dreams of an ex-prostitute, the hapless life of a perpetual student, victims of an anticommunist genocide, the travails of an elephant, even the vengeful fantasies of a stone. Dark, sexual, scatological, violent, and mordantly funny, these fractured fables span city and country, animal and human, myth and politics.

Like nothing else, Kurniawan’s stories bury themselves in the mind. His characters and insights are at once hauntingly familiar, peculiar, and twisted.

We will be meeting on Tuesday, May 28th, at 7 pm. We’ll be reading Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle.

It is published by Charco Press, which focuses on finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world.

About the book:

After Rita is found dead in a church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society.

Small Press will be meeting on Tuesday, June 25th, at 7 pm. We will be reading Lemon by Kwon Yeo-sun.

It is published by Other Press, which “embodies the best aspects of a truly independent publishing house: we cross borders to publish exceptional fiction and nonfiction from countries around the world and from right here at home.”

About the book:

Parasite meets The Good Son in this piercing psychological portrait of three women haunted by a brutal, unsolved crime.

In the summer of 2002, when Korea is abuzz over hosting the FIFA World Cup, eighteen-year-old Kim Hae-on is killed in what becomes known as the High School Beauty Murder. Two suspects quickly emerge: rich kid Shin Jeongjun, whose car Hae-on was last seen in, and delivery boy Han Manu, who witnessed her there just a few hours before her death. But when Jeongjun’s alibi checks out, and no evidence can be pinned on Manu, the case goes cold.

Seventeen years pass without any resolution for those close to Hae-on, and the grief and uncertainty take a cruel toll on her younger sister, Da-on, in particular. Unable to move on with her life, Da-on tries in her own twisted way to recover some of what she’s lost, ultimately setting out to find the truth of what happened. 

Shifting between the perspectives of Da-on and two of Hae-on’s classmates struck in different ways by her otherworldly beauty, Lemon ostensibly takes the shape of a crime novel. But identifying the perpetrator is not the main objective here: Kwon Yeo-sun uses this well-worn form to craft a searing, timely exploration of privilege, jealousy, trauma, and how we live with the wrongs we have endured and inflicted in turn.