Reading for the Craft Book Club with Pedro & Swati
Featured Book
Life of M: A Novel
"From the critically acclaimed author of the Outline trilogy, an irresistible novel of fame, power, beauty, and truth-and a blazing renovation of the form"-- Provided by publisher.
About This Event
Writing is an “apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered”, says the Pulitzer-winning poet Carl Phillips. Join us as we delve into the mysteries of the art of storytelling. In this workshop-adjacent book club, we will discuss everything from plot beats to perspective choices to sentence-level sonics of major literary works and small press gems, in an attempt to understand how specific authorial choices shape the experience and impact of a story. You do not have to be a writer to join us — just someone with a deep love for literature and endless curiosity about how a story gets told.
This month we'll discuss Rachel Cusk's irresistible novel of fame, power, beauty, and truth—and a blazing renovation of the form, Life of M.
“Life of M gathers all of Cusk’s signature themes, especially her frustration with character. Like Parade, the novel is sparse and mythic, composed of a series of hazily drawn impressions cut by acute portraits of urban malaise . . . Life of M also offers some of Cusk’s most beautiful passages in years on the fleetingness of our collective lives.”—Grace Byron, Dissent
“Cusk’s power lies in the authority of her sharp, spare prose, the glittering exactness of her sentences. She writes with crisp acuity about the frictionless (and therefore strangely lifeless) existence of the celebrity, the corrosive effect of fame on family relationships, the blend of fervent purity and crushing cynicism that delimits a person forged in the forcefields of power and pretence. At Cusk’s startling best, and there is a good deal of that here, her ideas land like punches or uncomfortable secrets muttered in our ears: it is a shock to realise that they are our secrets too . . . Life of M is powered by a formidable intelligence and shaped with exceptional technical skill . . . It is a book to admire enormously.”—Clare Clark, The Guardian
The movie star M is one of the most recognizable faces of our time. Her image is everywhere. It has been like that since she was a child.
With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. M may live in the same places as real people. She may meet her friends or collect her children from school or walk her dogs as they do. But it seems the rules of reality have melted away.
Now, a writer has decided to pay close attention to M’s life in the hope of understanding who she really is. It is hard not to feel ugly next to M, hard not to feel insignificant. But what truths—about the very experience of living—might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture?
In this astonishing novel, Rachel Cusk hunts for these truths without ever swerving away into self-deception. Her pursuit leads us across olive groves and beaches, behind the smoked windows of limousines, and through beautiful cities considered the great masterpieces of civilization. And at every turn, Cusk contemplates the cost of this beauty—and what we might lose when we are hypnotized by it.
Life of M is a thrilling investigation of who we are, and who we pretend to be, at this late stage of modern life when we are mesmerized more than ever by the images we see everywhere. It cuts through a world of noise and spectacle to bring us an eerie music of immense power and beauty.
Contact Genay, at bookclubs@mcnallyjackson.com with any questions.
About the Venue
McNally Jackson · Downtown Brooklyn
This Downtown Brooklyn location is the second McNally Jackson in Brooklyn. Opening in 2020, it occupies two stores of City Point and features an extensive selection of fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, rare books, and stationery.
Visit store pageMore at McNally Jackson · Downtown Brooklyn
McNally Editions Book Club with Rebecca
Are you overwhelmed by the pressure to keep up with the continuous barrage of new book releases? Are you interested in reading beyond the margins of today’s contemporary literary discourse? Do you want to inject a bit of surprise and intrigue into your reading life? Our club is centered around books that have been largely forgotten, the reissued classics and rare finds that have slipped from the mainstream and are waiting to be discovered by a new set of readers. This month we'll discuss Manuel Puig's startling anatomy of a small town in thrall to its own petty lusts, betrayals, scandals, thefts, and gossip--but most of all, to the movies, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine. "An intimate look at the maids, stifled housewives, and would-be gangsters living on the outskirts of Buenos Aires during the country’s period of political transformation from 1933 to 1948 . . . Luminous . . . A pop art classic."— Publishers Weekly "For many people—and certainly for Puig as a boy in small-town Argentina—the first and most absorbing form of storytelling is gossip: tales (almost always told by women) about romances and breakups, scandals and humiliations. There is an endless fascination in parsing other people’s lives, comparing them to ours, rendering judgment and imagining how our own lives might be judged. In Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Puig captures the human inclination to peer and weigh and compare, while taking advantage of that same inclination in his readers . . . [It is] perhaps his most lyrical novel."— Natasha Wimmer When it appeared in 1968, Manuel Puig’s debut—a portrait of the artist as a child in small-town Argentina—was hailed as revolutionary. Borrowing from the language of "true romance" and movie magazines, the techniques of American modernism, and Hollywood montage, Puig created an exuberant queer aesthetic while also celebrating the secret lives of women. Hanging on the conversations of his mother, friends, and neighbors, Puig's stand-in Toto pieces together stories as full of passion, desire, and revenge as anything dreamed up for the silver screen. “A screamingly funny book, with scenes of such utter bathos that only a student of final reels such as Puig could possibly have verbally recreated for us” (Alexander Coleman, New York Times), it is also a bittersweet love letter to the golden age of Hollywood. Contact Genay, at bookclubs@mcnallyjackson.com with any questions.
The Kitāb Club with Maria
Kitāb (کتاب) : an Arabic word meaning book. Join Maria's Kitāb club -- a space for Arab texts -- fiction and nonfiction -- to be savored, and dissected. We'll treat the books like a shared feast: everyone brings something (thoughts, opinions etc) and nothing's off the table. Come hungry!! This month we'll discuss Alexa Yasemin Brahme's novel about a young artist who struggles to find her way in New York City while navigating strained relationships, the reappearance of an ex, and her burgeoning sense of self, Good News. “Good News is a book for anyone who has ever felt torn between ambition and self-doubt, the pressure to meet others’ expectations and the thrill of following their own wildest desires into an uncharted future. I devoured this thoughtful, sexy, compelling story of a young artist determined to make something great of her art and herself.”—Naima Coster, NYT-bestselling author of What's Mine and Yours "A familiar exploration into the unease of early adulthood and the winding road to self-fulfillment."—Booklist Maggie is on the brink. Her MFA thesis—a vast canvas of twenty women suspended between life and death—is met with polite confusion, sending her into the throes of an obsessive work spiral. She’s ignoring calls from her frantic Turkish mother and drifting apart from her marriage-material boyfriend, Rob, who, lately, spends every waking moment at the office, including some suspiciously late nights. To make matters worse, her brother John (perfect, doctor) is dating Maggie’s art-world rival: a performance artist who constantly seems to be skyrocketing toward fame even after renouncing her name to be called simply “the Artist.” But it’s when Maggie’s ex reappears that her forced composure starts to slip. A smooth-talking art critic with power and charm, Rakib sees Maggie in a way that completely mystifies her. Then come whispers that her painting might be nominated for a grant that could launch her career. With deadlines looming, her relationship with Rob faltering, and her sense of self in flux, Maggie begins to question not just her art but the entire life she’s been trying to build. Set against the push and pull of immigrant family expectations, the competitive world of contemporary art, and the relentless uncertainty of one’s late twenties, Good News is a mordantly clever and emotionally resonant debut that will appeal to readers of Lily King, Sarah Thankam Mathews, and Coco Mellors. Contact Genay, at bookclubs@mcnallyjackson.com with any questions.
Broken Dishes Book Club with Swati
Have you ever watched a woman blow up her life, and thought, good for her? This is a book club for those who seek to disrupt notions of domestic bliss - we want batshit plots, women who don't settle, and eleventh hour plot twists. We want all this packaged into a very literary 300 pages or less. This book club will explore should-be and to-be classics by literary hotties of centuries past. Leave the dirty dishes at home and come indulge with us. This month we'll discuss Charmaine Craig's immersive and searing story of two women, their marriages, and the rivalry between them, My Nemesis. "Do you think there is more passion between lovers, or between nemeses? My Nemesis is about Tessa's affair with Charlie, and the even more powerful hatred she projects onto his wife, Wah. This is for anyone looking for more Challengers-esque drama, but this time between unhinged smart people in the art world."—Swati S., McNally Jackson Books Tessa is a successful writer who develops a friendship, first by correspondence and then in person, with Charlie, a ruggedly handsome philosopher and scholar based in Los Angeles. Sparks fly as they exchange ideas about Camus and masculine desire, and their intellectual connection promises more--but there are obstacles to this burgeoning relationship. While Tessa's husband Milton enjoys Charlie's company on his visits to the East Coast, Charlie's wife Wah is a different case, and she proves to be both adversary and conundrum to Tessa. Wah's traditional femininity and subservience to her husband strike Tessa as weaknesses, and she scoffs at the sacrifices Wah makes as adoptive mother to a Burmese girl, Htet, once homeless on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. But Wah has a kind of power too, especially over Charlie, and the conflict between the two women leads to a martini-fueled declaration by Tessa that Wah is "an insult to womankind." As Tessa is forced to deal with the consequences of her outburst and considers how much she is limited by her own perceptions, she wonders if Wah is really as weak as she has seemed, or if she might have a different kind of strength altogether. Compassionate and thought-provoking, My Nemesis is a brilliant story of seduction, envy, and the ways we publicly define and privately deceive ourselves today. Contact Genay, at bookclubs@mcnallyjackson.com with any questions.