2016 quite a year, and the future is looking… interesting. But the Rumpus Book Clubs fight on, choosing books that challenge and delight and inspire month after month. We choose books that haven’t been released yet, which means our members get them before anyone else, and then we get to talk about each book with its author. There aren’t any other book clubs quite like ours. (And they make great holiday gifts, too.) And, our Book Clubs help us keep The Rumpus running—so, you can speak with your favorite writers, read great books, and support the website in one fell swoop.
So what’s in store for December? In our original Book Club, we’re reading Jon Raymond’s Freebird, out from Graywolf Press. Jesse Eisenberg says of this book:
Jon Raymond’s wonderful new book Freebird poetically wrestles with the big and the small: how globalization and international conflicts reconcile with the personal; how the amorality of war affects individual psyches; how impulsive post adolescence mirrors impulsive old age. And the undercurrent of this increasingly suspenseful story is a fascinating discussion of environmental mutilation, at once a tangle of benign bureaucracy and calculated avarice, which Raymond tackles with equal parts sensitivity and expertise.
And in our Poetry Book Club, we’re reading Chris Santiago’s Tula, his debut collection and selected winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum prize by A. Van Jordan, out from Milkweed Editions. Their page for the book describes it this way:
Inspired by the experiences of the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents, Tula paints the portrait of a mythic homeland that is part ghostly underworld, part unknowable paradise. Language splinters. Impossible islands form an archipelago across its landscape. A mother sings lullabies and a father works the graveyard shift in Saint Paul—while in the Philippines, two dissident uncles and a grandfather send messages and telegrams from the afterlife.
You can join the Book Club or Poetry Book Club month-to-month, for six months, or annually, and you can also join both if you just can’t choose between the two. And get one for a friend, too—remember, our subscriptions are the perfect gift for the reader in your life, especially if you’re a last-minute shopper!
