with Sarah McNally
Although we can't meet in person for our monthly International Fiction Book Club, please join our interactive, virtual book club on Monday, April 20th, at 7 p.m. This month's book (some of you obtained your copy at our March 2nd meeting) is The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada, translated from Japanese by David Boyd (New Directions, 128 pages). For those who don't have The Factory yet, you can order a copy on our website;
estimated shipping time is 1 week.
with Benjamin Moser
We are thrilled to announce that Benjamin Moser, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sontag: Her Life and Work, is hosting our second McNally Jackson Seminar. Over the course of four weekly Zoom meetings, we'll discuss both his biography of Susan Sontag (which Leslie Jamison calls "utterly riveting and consistently insightful"), and Sontag's writing about illness. Sontag’s intellectual rigor, her uncommon ability to anatomize a subject (an issue, a place, a photograph, a disease) from every angle with radiant style, was critically valuable in her lifetime, and remains an important model for us now. Our group will use her life and her writing as a springboard for conversations about contemporary life, in and out of lockdown.
with Javier Molea
We will discuss La uruguaya, de Pedro Mairal (Argentina).
“Como en los sueños, en Montevideo las cosas me resultaban parecidas pero diferentes. Eran pero no eran.” Lucas Pereyra viaja a Uruguay en barco por el día a buscar dólares. Son tiempos de restricciones cambiarias. Tiene ya arreglado un encuentro secreto en Montevideo, pero sus planes pueden fallar. Encandilado por el recuerdo de un verano anterior y agobiado por un matrimonio que se resquebraja, sueña con escaparse y no volver. ¿Con quién se va a encontrar? Montevideo, esa ciudad idealizada por la distancia, se volverá impredecible. La uruguaya es una novela inquietante y ferozmente entretenida.
Con pulso magistral, Pedro Mairal sostiene la intriga en cada una de sus páginas y demuestra, de modo irrefutable, que es uno de los grandes de la literatura argentina contemporánea.
with Emma & Javier
We will be discussing The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin.
Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life—Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian mother planet, Urras, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.
Stephen Hough in conversation
with Cheryl Pearl Sucher
Since Cheryl Pearl Sucher married a New Zealander in 1999, she has been living between two worlds: the Greater New York City area and the Hawkes Bay of New Zealand, two places that are about as far apart on the planet as one can travel. Though she has often felt torn between her very different lives, she has also felt that her life experience and artistic vision has been enhanced by living as both an insider and an outsider in such different but extraordinary places. This interview series is born out her experience between these worlds, and as a published fiction writer, bookseller, journalist, memoirist and avocational musical traveler.
In this edition, Cheryl talks to Stephen Hough, author of Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More.