The Book Clubs are rocking right now with this month’s selections, George Saunders’s Tenth of December and Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair, but there’s some great stuff on the horizon.
We’re pleased to announce that our February selection for the Rumpus Book Club is Emily Rapp’s The Still Point of the Turning World. Publishers Weekly had this to say about it.
Her elegant, restrained work flows with reflections and excerpts from writers and poets like Mary Shelley, Pablo Neruda, and Sylvia Plath, as well as supporters who helped her during the difficult unraveling of her son’s condition. Writing about Ronan allowed her to claim the sorrow and truly look at her son the way he was. Her narrative does not follow Ronan as far as his death, but gleans lessons from Buddhism and elsewhere in order that Rapp could “walk through this fire without being consumed by it.”
The Poetry Book Club will be reading Kate Greenstreet’s Young Tambling, which Greenstreet describes as “an experimental memoir.” The Ahsahta Press website says this about Young Tambling:
Greenstreet does not dabble in teleological platitudes: the lives crosscutting these poems are not singular but plural and sublime, full of sacrifice and empathy for the lost. In Young Tambling, a life’s meaning is born of its poet’s song, and a memory cannot reveal its truth until it finds its ballad.
We’re also excited to announce that our March selection for the Book Club will be Matthew Spektor’s American Dream Machine, out from Tin House on April 9 (that’s right–members get the book a month before anyone else does). And our Poetry Book Club selection will be Lynn Xu’s Debts and Lessons, out from Omnidawn Books April 1.
In other book club news, T Cooper, author of November selection Real Man Adventures is on tour right now. He’s in Nashville tomorrow and Asheville on Saturday with special guests Peg Hambright (at both shows) and Clay Aiken in Asheville. Check the website for future dates in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Coldfront Mag is currently listing their 40 best books of poetry from 2013. They’ve only released numbers 21-40 so far, but it’s nice to see Rumpus Poetry Book Club selectee The Ground by Rowan Ricardo Phillips come in at number 33. We expect to see other books we’ve read appear in the top 20.
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