Book Groups at Politics & Prose
December 2010
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In This Issue
Book Group Night
Author Q&A - Howard Norman
New in Paperback
Staff Recommendations
How to Register Your Book with Us


1. Choose Your Book
   
This can be hard, we
    know.

2. Let us know!

    Call, e-mail, or come
    by the store. We  
    request a 3 week
    advanced notice for
    older titles.


3. Wait for us to  
    call/e-mail.

    When your books are
    in, we'll contact your
    group.


Upcoming In-store Book Group Meetings


 

Travel

December 7, 7pm

Scoop

by Evelyn Waugh

 

Women's Biography

December 13, 7:30pm

Hiroshima in the Morning

by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

 

Evening Fiction

December 14, 7:30pm

The Razor's Edge

by W. Somerset Maugham

 

Daytime

December 15, 12:30pm

*meeting outside store

The Ginger Man

by J.P. Donleavy

 

Fascinating History

December 16, 7:30pm

Massachusetts Avenue in the Gilded Age

by Mark N. Ozer

 

Legacies of American Exceptionalism (Swarthmore)

December 20, 7:30pm

Uncle Tom's Cabin

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

 

Graphic Novel

December 22, 7:30pm

City of Glass: The Graphic Novel

by Paul Auster

 

Spirituality

No December meeting

Public Affairs
No December meeting

Poetry
No December meeting

Classics

January 3, 7:30pm

The Aeneid of Virgil

translated by Allen Mandelbaum

Travel
January 4, 7pm
Guests of the Sheik
by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea

Futurist
January 5, 7:30pm
Switch
by Chip Heath
 
Women's Biography
January 10, 7:30pm
Bad Girls Go Everywhere
by Jennifer Scanlon

Evening Fiction
January 11, 7:30pm
All the Names
by Jose Saramago

Science Fiction & Fantasy
January 13, 7:30pm
Reading the Bones
by Sheree R. Thomas

Legacies of American Exceptionalism
January 17, 7:30pm
The American
by Henry James

Daytime
January 19, 12:30pm
Butcher's Crossing
by John Williams 


Holiday Hours




December 5, 12, 19
10am - 9pm

December 24
9am - 7pm

December 25
Closed

December 26
12pm - 8pm

December 31
9am - 5pm

January 1
Closed

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Save the Date!

 Mark your calendars for our upcoming Book  
 Group Night to be held on Monday, January
 31, 2011
.

Book Group Night is a wonderful opportunity to meet our book group coordinators, connect with other groups, learn about spring releases that are perfect for groups and hear what our staff is currently reading.

To assist us with planning, please RSVP to [email protected].
Author Q&A: Howard Norman
 

At Politics & Prose, we are fortunate to provide readers with not just books, but with a more intimate connection to  authors and their ideas. In our first book group interview, author Howard Norman talks with bookseller Bill Leggett.



Bio:
HOWARD NORMAN is a three-time winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a winner of the Lannan Award for fiction. His 1987 novel, The Northern Lights, was nominated for a National Book Award, as was his 1994 novel The Bird Artist. He is also author of the novels The Museum Guard, The Haunting of L, and Devotion. His books have been translated into twelve languages. Norman teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland. He lives in Washington, D.C., and Vermont with his wife and daughter.


Bill Leggett: As a teacher of writing and literature, and as someone who has participated in many book discussions, what would you as a reader want to get from a discussion of one of your books, or really any work of literature?

Howard Norman:  This week I participated in a discussion of a memoir of mine, In Fond Remembrance of Me, which is about some months in the arctic working with Inuit folktales and a woman named Helen Tanizaki, who remains tremendously important to me. She died in the late l970's in Kyoto. While we were indeed discussing a memoir and not a novel,  as the discussion went along, I was aware that the things that may be sustaining to a writer during the years it takes to compose a book may be quite different than what a reader might suspect they are.  In this regard, it is important, I feel, to say that the most persistently "autobiographical" aspect of any novel is the imagination itself. There is nothing more personal.  The facts of a writer's life are one thing, how those facts become -- again, Chekhov -- part of the "elixir of the writerly imagination" as manifested in a novel is something else altogether.    

I would like readers to experience a writer doing the best he can to give characters back their lives,  with the vivid immediacy and perhaps also the spectral quality of a s�ance.

BL: Again, as a reader, have you discovered anything lately you think would a be a good choice for a group discussion? (This could cover any genre).

HN:  To love a book and recommend it for a "discussion" may be quite different things. However, in thinking about the devotion and erudition of book clubs in general, allow me to "recommend" a forthcoming novel,  The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht,  an older novel,  A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, A Month in the Country by J.M. Carr,  and the wonderful stories of Gina Berriault collected in Women in Their Beds,  one of our finest and yet overlooked writers of short stories.

BL:Your books deal with difficult love affairs, and with characters who reflect deeply on their lives and choices and yet are also involved in acts of violence. Would you shed some light on this?

HN:  A friend noticed and said, "In Howard's novels, when a couple finally end up together, it is because they have exhausted all negative possibilities!"  And yes, very difficult courtships are a kind of narrative strategy for me. I think narratively;  one narrative is how do history, people's deepest natures, and even fate intervene on the finding of love. The novel I'm presently writing, Next Life Might Be Kinder,  is partly about a man whose wife was murdered, but who keeps seeing her -- every evening she lines books up on a beach. He doesn't want to let her go;  that is, he wants their life-long courtship -- the courtship within the marriage -- to continue.
  
While it is true that some of my characters reflect deeply on their own lives, just as often it is a neighbor, or romantic interest, or colleague of some sort, who reflect even more deeply on another's life.  This is reflection by indirection -- characters attempting to get other characters to think and act a certain way.  Chekhov said, "When a love story is unfolding, it is by definition philosophical, though it doesn't need be written in  lofty philosophical language. There has to be passion, though. Passionate intensity." There it is -- I've gone and done it again! -- asked Chekhov to comment on how I want readers to view my stories.  To let another far more articulate sensibility to comment on my own!

Violence is in my novels.  Each has a violent act -- or acts -- as an intensifying element to the arc of the love story. But those incidents are not meant to have the entire story reliant on them.  They are crescendos of emotion.  In What Is Left The Daughter,  certainly the sinking of the Caribou Ferry by a German U-boat -- and the murder of the young German philology student Hans Mohring -- are ghastly acts
of violence. But they also intervene on a love affair and young marriage and it is in how violence detours lives permanently that I am very interested in while writing novels.

Click here to continue reading Bill's interview with Howard Norman.

New in Paperback, Perfect for Book Groups

The Finkler Question
by Howard Jacobson

The 2010 Man Booker Prize-winner is an unflinching satire about aging and anti-Semitism, exclusion and belonging. Julian Treslove, an unmarried Gentile, is mugged one evening as he departs from a dinner with his two closest friends, both of whom are Jewish. Treslove believes the act of violence was misdirected anti-Semitism. The result is a re-examination of self and identity that is funny, clever, sad, and subtle.




The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
by Heidi W. Durrow

Durrow's engrossing debut novel opens with Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I, and a tragedy that makes her an orphan. Under the care of her stern African-American grandmother and living in a new city, Durrow's light complexion and blue eyes make her the center of unwanted attention in the mostly black community. A sensitive look at memory, truth, and identity reminiscent of Danzy Senna's Caucasia and Nella Larsen's Passing

Forthcoming in paperback soon.
Call 202-364-1919 or e-mail to reserve copies for your book group.



When Everything Changed
by Gail Collins

Combing oral history and keen research, Collins' examination of five decades of progress - from the time women couldn't apply for a credit card without their husbands' permission to Hillary Clinton's presidential bid - this even-handed yet dynamic account examines the changes in politics, family, popular culture, work, fashion, and sex that have affected women.




Bicycle Diaries
by David Byrne

Part travelogue, part journal, David Byrne whisks us on a journey through Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Berlin, London, San Francisco and more - all from the seat of his bike. Replete with photographs, Byrne reflects the change and growth of cities, the influences of architecture, and the cultural specificity of music in this personal, sharp-eyed, and humorous treatise on urban biking.   


Staff Recommendations for Book Groups

 You or Someone Like You
 by Chandler Burr
 
Chandler Burr's smart, illuminating novel is a journey through the power of literature to shape and transform lives. Anne Rosenbaum is the wife of Hollywood executive Howard, a man wrestling with his Orthodox Jewish roots in the bright lights and privileged world of Los Angeles.
- Lacey Dunham



So Long, See You Tomorrow
by William Maxwell

The former New Yorker fiction editor delivers a touching story with stunning narrative style. As an old man remembers a scandal in his hometown, Maxwell rewards us with a pitch-perfect blend of memory, fact, and imagination.
 - Conor Moran