Reading Modern Literature

Join us as we discuss the first half of Jemisin's short story collection! For this meeting, we'll be discussing stories from the beginning up through "The Evaluators".

Publisher's description:

Three-time Hugo Award winner and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption that sharply examine modern society in her first collection of short fiction, which includes never-before-seen stories.

'Marvelous and wide-ranging.' -- Los Angeles Times
"Gorgeous" -- NPR Books
"Breathtakingly imaginative and narratively bold." -- Entertainment Weekly

Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul."

If you don't have a physical copy of the book, you can find a copy of it here:

Join us as we discuss the second half of Jemisin's short story collection! For this meeting, we'll be discussing the stories starting from "Walking Awake" until the end.

If you don't have a physical copy of the book, you can find a copy of it here:

Join us as we begin our journey into MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) literature by discussing Adania's novel - the first of two works focused on Palestine with which we're starting the series.

Publisher's description:

"A searing, beautiful novel meditating on war, violence, memory, and the sufferings of the Palestinian people

Finalist for the National Book Award
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize

Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba―the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people―and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand.

Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past."

If you don't have a physical copy of the book, you can find a copy of it here:

Join us as we continue our journey through MENA literature by discussing the first part of Khoury's epic novel about the Palestinian struggle.

Publisher's description:

"A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
One of Kansas City Star's 100 Noteworthy Books of the Year
A Boldtype Notable Book of the Year
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

Drawing on the stories he gathered from refugee camps over the course of many years, Elias Khoury's epic novel Gate of the Sun has been called the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga.

Yunes, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter, lies in a coma. Keeping vigil at the old man's bedside is his spiritual son, Khalil, who nurses Yunes, refusing to admit that his hero may never regain consciousness. Like a modern-day Scheherazade, Khalil relates the story of Palestinian exile while also recalling Yunes's own extraordinary life and his love for his wife, whom he meets secretly over the years at Bab al-Shams, the Gate of the Sun."

For this meeting, we'll be discussing Part I, entitled The Galilee Hospital - just under the first half of the novel. If you don't have a physical copy of the book, you can find a copy of it here: