Small Press fiction book club

Small Press Book Club will be meeting on Thursday, February 27th, at 7 pm. We will be reading The Long Form by Kate Briggs. It is published by Dorothy, a publishing project, an award-winning feminist press dedicated to works of fiction or near fiction or writing about fiction.

About the book:

From the award-winning author of the book-length essay This Little Art, a debut novel that reaches back to the start of the novel tradition and outward to the complexities of contemporary life.
Kate Brigg’s debut novel—the follow-up to her acclaimed This Little Art—is the story of a young mother, Helen, awake with her baby. Together they are moving through a morning routine that is in one sense entirely ordinary—resting, feeding, pacing. Yet in the closeness of their rented flat, such everyday acts take on epic scope, thoughts and objects made newly alive in the light of their shared attention. Then the rhythm of their morning is interrupted: a delivery person arrives with a used copy of Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, which Helen has ordered online. She begins to read, and attention shifts. As their day unfolds, the intimate space Helen shares with her baby becomes entwined with Fielding’s novel, with other books and ideas, and with questions about class and privilege, housing and caregiving, and the support structures that underlie durational forms of codependency, both social and artistic.

Small Press Book Club will be meeting on Thursday, March 27th, at 7 pm. We will be reading Us Fools by Nora Lange. It is published by Two Dollar Radio, a family-run press founded in 2005.

About the book:

A tragicomic, intimate American story of two precocious sisters coming of age during the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s.

Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents' volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis.

As Jo and Bernie's imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents' realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne--free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence--rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she's learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world.

With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the worst that capitalism and their circumstances has to throw at them.

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.