Small Press fiction book club
Small presses publish some of the 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.
Small Press Book Club will be meeting Thursday, October 30th at 7pm. We will be reading THE CAFE WITH NO NAME by Robert Seethaler, published by Europa Editions.
About the book:
Summer 1966. Robert Simon is in his early thirties and has a dream. Raised in a home for war orphans, Robert has nonetheless grown into a warm-hearted, hard-working, and determined man. When the former owners of the corner café in the Carmelite market square shutter the business, Robert sees that the chance to realize his dream has arrived.
The place, dark and dilapidated, is in a poor neighborhood of the Austrian capital, but for some time now a new wind has been blowing, and the air is filled with an inexplicable energy and a desire for renewal. In the newspapers with which fishmongers wrap the char and trout from the Danube, one can read about great things to come, a bright future beginning to rise from the quagmire of the past. Enlivened by these promises, Robert refurbishes the café and, rewarding him for his efforts and search of a congenial place to gather, talk, read, or just sit and be, customers arrive, bringing their stories of passions, friendships, abandonments, and bereavements. Some are in search of company, others long for love, or just a place where they can feel understood. As the city is transformed, Robert's café becomes at once a place of refuge and one from which to observe, mourn, and rejoice.
Combining the enchantment of warm prose with tender humor, Robert Seethaler has written a charming parable of human existence animated by unforgettable characters and a kaleidoscope of human stories.
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The final meeting of 2025 for Small Press Book Club will be on Wednesday, November 19th at 7pm. We will be reading MRS. DALLOWAY by Vriginia Woolf, an edition published by New York Review of Books. You can purchase the book by clicking here.
About the book:
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's tale of a day in the life of one upper-middle-class woman, is one of the best known and most celebrated novels of the twentieth century. It is a simple novel, on the one hand, in which its protagonist goes about London preparing for the party she will hold in the evening. It is also a complex novel, one that interweaves Mrs. Dalloway's story with those of a shell-shocked veteran, of her old lover, of her unhappy teenage daughter. Together, they form a haunting, mesmerising picture of individual loneliness and post-World War I British society. As Virginia Woolf wrote of it: "I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense."
This new edition of Mrs. Dalloway, published to mark the centennial of its original appearance, will be followed by new editions of To the Lighthouse and The Waves in celebration of their respective centenaries. All featuring specially commissioned covers that pay tribute to the original designs by Hogarth Press, these editions are meticulously and sensitively edited by scholar and literary critic Edward Mendelson, and are the first to reflect the full range of revisions Virginia Woolf made to her three greatest novels.
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