November 2021: Dear Committee Members by Juile Schumacher

 Becky picked Dear Committee Members by Juile Schumacher for us to read in November. It's a funny one - especially for us English majors!!

ABOUT THE BOOK

A Best Book of the Year:  NPR and Boston Globe

Finally a novel that puts the "pissed" back into "epistolary."

Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels. His star (he thinks) student can't catch a break with his brilliant (he thinks) work Accountant in a Bordello, based on Melville's Bartleby. In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this droll and inventive novel uses to tell that tale is a series of hilarious letters of recommendation that Fitger is endlessly called upon by his students and colleagues to produce, each one of which is a small masterpiece of high dudgeon, low spirits, and passive-aggressive strategies. We recommend Dear Committee Members to you in the strongest possible terms.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julie Schumacher grew up in Wilmington, Delaware and graduated from Oberlin College and Cornell University.

Her first published story, “Reunion,” written to fulfill an undergraduate writing assignment (“tell a family tale”) was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1983. Subsequent stories and essays were published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, MS, The Chronicle for Higher Education, Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards , and other venues.

Her first novel, The Body Is Water , was published by Soho Press in 1995 and was an ALA Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Schumacher’s other books include the national best-seller, Dear Committee Members (winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor); The Shakespeare Requirement , Doodling for Academics (a satirical coloring book); and five novels for younger readers.

Schumacher lives in St. Paul and is a Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English. She has won multiple teaching awards and has been recognized as a “Scholar of the College.”

From https://julieschumacher.com

October 2021: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

 Amy has picked "The Fifth Season" by N.K. Jemisin for October 2021.

ABOUT THE BOOK

WINNER OF THE 2016 HUGO: BEST NOVEL

This is the way the world ends. Again.

Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze — the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization’s bedrock for a thousand years — collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman’s vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She’ll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.

“Stone Hunger,” a novelette set in the Stillness. Unrelated to the novels, just in the same universe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

“The Most Celebrated Science Fiction And Fantasy Writer of Her Generation.”

—The New York Times

N(ora). K. Jemisin is a New York Times-bestselling author of speculative fiction short stories and novels, who lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. In 2018, she became the first author to win three Best Novel Hugos in a row. She has also won a Nebula Award, two Locus Awards, and is a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.

Her short fiction has been published in pro markets such as Clarkesworld, Tor.com, WIRED, and Popular Science; semipro markets such as Ideomancer and Abyss & Apex; and podcast markets and print anthologies. Her novels, a novella, and two short story collections are out now from Orbit Books. Her novels are represented by Lucienne Diver of the Knight Agency.

She is an emeritus member of the Altered Fluid writing group. In addition to writing, she has been a counseling psychologist and educator, a hiker and biker, and a political/feminist/anti-racist blogger. Although she no longer pens the New York Times Book Review science fiction and fantasy column called “Otherworldly” (which she covered for 3 years), her reviews can still be found online.

 

September 2021: The Warmth of Other Suns

 Tesha picked "The Warmth of Other Suns" by Isabel Wilkerson for the September book. She didn't realize it was so long, but we decided to spread it out over two months.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In this critically acclaimed, modern classic of narrative nonfiction, three young people set out on a perilous journey out of the Jim Crow South to the North and West in search of what the novelist Richard Wright called “the warmth of other suns.”  

An intimate epic that puts in perspective our current era, The Warmth Of Other Suns follows Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster over the tumultuous decades of the 20th century as they join the six million African-Americans fleeing southern repression in what would come to be known as the Great Migration, a watershed in American history.

This deeply researched book interweaves their stories with the larger forces that triggered one of the largest migrations within the borders of this country.

“Absolutely revolutionary,” Ta-Nehisi Coates said of The Warmth of Other Suns. “I always felt like it was the spiritual mother of ‘The Case for Reparations.’”

The Great Migration was a leaderless quest for freedom, lasting from World War I to the 1970s, and became one of the biggest underrecognized stories of the 20th Century. It changed the country, North and South. It brought us John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Bill Russell, Motown, Denzel Washington, Michelle Obama -- all children or grandchildren of the Great Migration. It changed the social, cultural and political landscape of the United States, with consequences that persist to the current day.

The Warmth of Other Suns became an instant New York Times bestseller upon publication and has reappeared multiple times since its release. It has been named to TIME’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade and to The New York Times Magazine’s Best Nonfiction of All Time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, has become a leading figure in narrative nonfiction, an interpreter of the human condition, and an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country, and our current era of upheaval.

Through her writing, Wilkerson brings the invisible and the marginalized into the light and into our hearts. Through her lectures, she explores with authority the need to reconcile America’s karmic inheritance and the origins of both our divisions and our shared commonality.

Her debut work, The Warmth of Other Suns, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize and was shortlisted for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

She is a native of Washington, D.C., and a daughter of the Great Migration, the mass movement that she would go on to write about. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994, as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, making her the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She then devoted fifteen years and interviewed more than 1,200 people to tell the story of the six million people, among them her parents, who defected from the Jim Crow South.

As for her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the venerable U.K. bookseller, Waterstone’s calls it an “expansive, lyrical and stirring account of the unspoken system of divisions that govern our world.” 

MORE FROM ISABEL WILKERSON:

Check out Oprah Winfrey's Book Club series on "Caste." 

 

July 2021: Daughters of Kobani

 Kevira picked "Daughters of Kobani" by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon for July 2021. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The extraordinary story of the women who took on the Islamic State and won

“The Daughters of Kobani is an unforgettable and nearly mythic tale of women's power and courage. The young women profiled in this book fought a fearsome war against brutal men in impossible circumstances—and proved in the process what girls and women can accomplish when given the chance to lead. Brilliantly researched and respectfully reported, this book is a lesson in heroism, sacrifice, and the real meaning of sisterhood. I am so grateful that this story has been told.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat, Pray, Love

“Absolutely fascinating and brilliantly written, The Daughters of Kobani is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand both the nobility and the brutality of war. This is one of the most compelling stories in modern warfare.” —Admiral William H. McRaven, author of Make Your Bed

In 2014, northeastern Syria might have been the last place you would expect to find a revolution centered on women's rights. But that year, an all-female militia faced off against ISIS in a little town few had ever heard of: Kobani. By then, the Islamic State had swept across vast swaths of the country, taking town after town and spreading terror as the civil war burned all around it. From that unlikely showdown in Kobani emerged a fighting force that would wage war against ISIS across northern Syria alongside the United States. In the process, these women would spread their own political vision, determined to make women's equality a reality by fighting—house by house, street by street, city by city—the men who bought and sold women.

Based on years of on-the-ground reporting, The Daughters of Kobani is the unforgettable story of the women of the Kurdish militia that improbably became part of the world's best hope for stopping ISIS in Syria. Drawing from hundreds of hours of interviews, bestselling author Gayle Tzemach Lemmon introduces us to the women fighting on the front lines, determined to not only extinguish the terror of ISIS but also prove that women could lead in war and must enjoy equal rights come the peace. In helping to cement the territorial defeat of ISIS, whose savagery toward women astounded the world, these women played a central role in neutralizing the threat the group posed worldwide. In the process they earned the respect—and significant military support—of U.S. Special Operations Forces.

Rigorously reported and powerfully told, The Daughters of Kobani shines a light on a group of women intent on not only defeating the Islamic State on the battlefield but also changing women's lives in their corner of the Middle East and beyond.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana (2011), about a young entrepreneur who supported her community under the Taliban, Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield (2015), and The Daughters of Kobani (2021), the story of what ISIS has left in its wake: the most far-reaching experiment in women’s equality in the least likely place in the world brought to you by women who have been battling ISIS town by town, street by street since 2013. These women served as America’s ground force in the fight to defeat the Islamic State and The Daughters of Kobani tells for the first time this David and Goliath story of how they came to serve ISIS its first battlefield defeat. Ashley’s War is currently being developed into a major motion picture at Universal with Reese Witherspoon producing, and The Daughters of Kobani has been optioned by HiddenLight Productions, founded by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sam Branson, and Chelsea Clinton. 

Lemmon, who serves as an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, along with private sector leadership roles in emerging technology and national security firms, began writing about entrepreneurship in conflict and post-conflict zones while studying for her MBA at Harvard following a decade covering politics at the ABC News Political Unit. This work from Afghanistan, Rwanda, Liberia, Bosnia and beyond has been published by the World Bank, Harvard Business School, the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review and CNN, among others. Following MBA study, she led public policy analysis during the global financial crisis at the global investment firm PIMCO.

Lemmon is a frequent speaker on national security topics, including at the Aspen Security Forum and TED forums, and has given talks at West Point, ODNI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the National Infantry Museum. Her TED Talk on Ashley’s War and the reshaping of the hero story to include women has received more than a million views worldwide.  She regularly appears on MSNBC, CNN, PBS, and National Public Radio. Along with her national security work, she has reported and written extensively on topics including child marriage in the United States for PBS NewsHour and on school choice, single moms and the power and importance of girls’ ambition for The Atlantic. Lemmon holds an MBA from Harvard and received the Dean’s Award for her work on women’s entrepreneurship. In addition to serving as a Robert Bosch Fellow in Germany, she served as a Fulbright scholar in Spain, on the board of the international aid organization Mercy Corps and is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee. She speaks Spanish, German and French and is conversant in Dari and Kurmanci.

 

June 2021: 'The Topeka School' by Ben Lerner

 Susan has selected "The Topeka School" by Ben Lerner for us to read in June 2021.

ABOUT THE BOOK

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR

A TIME, GQ, Vulture, and WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK of the YEAR
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize
Winner of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award

ALSO NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Esquire, NPR, Vogue,

Amazon, Kirkus, The Times (UK), Buzzfeed, Vanity Fair, The Telegraph (UK), Financial Times (UK), Lit Hub, The Times Literary Supplement (UK), The New York Post, Daily Mail (UK), The Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian (UK), Electric Literature, SPY.com, and the New York Public Library

From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right

Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ’97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting “lost boys” to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart―who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient―into the social scene, to disastrous effect.

Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry (The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path), three novels (Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and The Topeka School) and a work of criticism (The Hatred of Poetry). His collaborations with artists include Blossom (with Thomas Demand), The Polish Rider (with Anna Ostoya), and The Snows of Venice (with Alexander Kluge). Lerner has been a a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations. In 2011 he won the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie", making him the first American to receive this honor. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.

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February 2021: Nine Perfect Strangers

 Our February pick from Becky is "Nine Perfect Strangers" by Liane Moriarty. "I am excited to read something I haven't read by one of my very favorite authors," said Becky. "Also, I was able to grab the audio book without any wait on Libby."

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

 “If three characters were good in Big Little Lies, nine are even better in Nine Perfect Strangers.” —Lisa Scottoline, The New York Times Book Review

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of

Big Little Lies

Could ten days at a health resort really change you forever? In Liane Moriarty’s latest page-turner, nine perfect strangers are about to find out...

Nine people gather at a remote health resort. Some are here to lose weight, some are here to get a reboot on life, some are here for reasons they can’t even admit to themselves. Amidst all of the luxury and pampering, the mindfulness and meditation, they know these ten days might involve some real work. But none of them could imagine just how challenging the next ten days are going to be.

Frances Welty, the formerly best-selling romantic novelist, arrives at Tranquillum House nursing a bad back, a broken heart, and an exquisitely painful paper cut. She’s immediately intrigued by her fellow guests. Most of them don’t look to be in need of a health resort at all. But the person that intrigues her most is the strange and charismatic owner/director of Tranquillum House. Could this person really have the answers Frances didn’t even know she was seeking? Should Frances put aside her doubts and immerse herself in everything Tranquillum House has to offer – or should she run while she still can?

It’s not long before every guest at Tranquillum House is asking exactly the same question.

Combining all of the hallmarks that have made her writing a go-to for anyone looking for wickedly smart, page-turning fiction that will make you laugh and gasp, Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers once again shows why she is a master of her craft.

PS:
The series is expected to debut on Hulu in 2021 to accommodate its talent's schedules. Blossom Films and Made Up Stories closed a pre-emptive deal for TV/film rights to Nine Perfect Strangers, which spent 13 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, ahead of its November 2018 publication.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Liane Moriarty is the Australian author of seven internationally best-selling novels: Three Wishes, The Last Anniversary, What Alice Forgot, The Hypnotist’s Love Story and the number 1 New York Times bestsellers: The Husband's Secret, Big Little Lies and Truly Madly Guilty. Her books have been translated into over forty languages and read by more than 14 million people worldwide.

Big Little Lies and Truly Madly Guilty both debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list - the first time this has been achieved by an Australian. Big Little Lies was adapted into a multiple award-winning HBO series starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon, who have also optioned the film rights for Truly Madly Guilty. Truly Madly Guilty has sold over 1 million copies in the US alone.

Liane lives in Sydney, Australia, together with her husband, son, daughter and Labrador. You can find out more at www.lianemoriarty.com and www.facebook.com/LianeMoriartyAuthor 

LINK TO PAST BOOK CLUB PICK BY LIANE MORIARTY:

We read "What Alice Forgot" previously. See more here.