#litsyndicate

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Book club devotees! The #litsyndicate meets tonight at 7PM to discuss Natalia Ginzburg's FAMILY LEXICON. Can't make it this evening? Join us next month on Tuesday, March 5th when we'll discuss Sigrid Nunez's THE FRIEND. 🐩✨ About the book: In The Friend, a writer living in a tiny NYC apartment and mourning the suicide of a close friend inherets a Great Dane. While the book is filled with anecdotes about dogs and musings on grief and friendship, it is centrally concerned with literature and creative writing. Ed recommends this nuanced and pitch-perfect novel. (at Unabridged Bookstore) https://www.instagram.com/p/BthAnPancud/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=4h2f4vjt2cqj

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📚 Book club enthusiasts! 📚January's #litsyndicate pick is Natalia Ginzburg's FAMILY LEXICON. We'll meet to discuss this autobiographical novel on Tuesday, February 5th at 7PM. Those who wish to chat and unwind beforehand are welcome to join us at 6:30 for complimentary sweets and wine. 🍷🍪Copies of the book are available for purchase at our front counter. Join us! • About the book: . "An Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, doubtful, comical, indispensable, comes to life in the pages of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking—when he isn’t provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini’s Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives. . Family Lexicon is about a family and language—and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel, yet everything is true. 'Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy [it],' Ginzburg tells us at the start. 'The places, events, and people are all real.'" - NYRB Classics (at Unabridged Bookstore) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bsq9RwqHWdt/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1u5ox6s6jhz1q

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100% of our book club members recommend HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL. Thanks to everyone for a wonderful discussion! #litsyndicate (at Unabridged Bookstore) https://www.instagram.com/p/BnU8Ymjl1Kg/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=14f7jdl4tki7g

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Our book club meets this evening at 6:30 to discuss Jesmyn Ward’s incendiary SING, UNBURIED, SING. Can’t make it tonight? Join us next month on Tuesday, August 7th when we’ll discuss Jenny Erpenbeck’s timely GO, WENT, GONE. • About the book: Upon seeing some African refugees staging a hunger strike in a Berlin park, the routine existence of a retired German classics professor (Richard) is abruptly changed forever. Go, Went, Gone is a touching portrait of a man whose curiosity turns into compassion, a powerful meditation on the harrowing fate of refugees and a scathing indictment of bureaucratic policy. The tragic stories and fraught futures of the migrants is powerfully told in a narrative that is calm, almost matter-of-fact (in what one reviewer called "lyrically austere prose"), and suggests that the asylum seekers and Richard (himself the victim of the "mayhem of war") share a common history of displacement. A powerful tale, intense and unsettling, gripping and thought-provoking, that appeals to our conscience and common humanity--- just like the main character Richard, we, the reader, are profoundly changed by the dozen or so refugees we meet here. • #litsyndicate #instabookclub #jesmynward #singunburiedsing #jennyerpenbeck #gowentgone @scribnerbooks @ndpublishing (at Unabridged Bookstore)

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ICYMI: May’s book club pick is Négar Djavadi’s DISORIENTAL! We’ll meet to discuss this terrific debut on Tuesday, June 5th at 6:30PM. Join us! 🌸💐 • About the book: Disoriental begins innocuously with the narrator, Kimiâ, at a fertility clinic in contemporary Paris. Soon, however, the reader is thrown into the past, encountering Kimiâ's Persian great grandfather and eventually learning of her family's harrowing escape to France during the Iranian Revolution. This ambitious, intricate story weaves a family's history with the history of a country, but it is firmly rooted in one woman's exploration of her place in the world, as a refugee from her homeland and an outcast from her family. Blending the personal and the political, tragedy and humor, the evocative story that unfolds is full of heart and warmth, unearthing sharp truths about diaspora, integration and segregation, sexuality, and how our family histories and political/cultural oppressions shape who we become. Ultimately, Disoriental is about the freedom to live and love in a world that doesn't always grant such freedoms, unless you fight for them. Multigenerational sagas don't always work, but Djavadi is a masterful storyteller. Disoriental doesn't merely work, it absolutely triumphs. • Translated from the French by Tina Kover. 🇮🇷 #translatedtuesday #litsyndicate #négardjavadi #disoriental (at Unabridged Bookstore)

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Carmen Boullosa’s TEXAS: THE GREAT THEFT tells the story of an all-but-forgotten 1859 Mexican invasion of the United States. Told polyphonically through a lively and diverse ensemble of characters, TEXAS offers valuable context for understanding the history of America’s volatile borderlands. Translated from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee. 🇲🇽 Our book club will discuss this remarkable novel on Tuesday, April 3rd at 6:30. Join us! #translatedtuesday #texasthegreattheft #carmenboullosa #litsyndicate (at Unabridged Bookstore)

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Book club enthusiasts! One week from today (that's Monday, March 5th) the Lit Syndicate will discuss Hari Kunzru's WHITE TEARS! Join us at 6:30 for wine and sweets from @vanillepatisserie. The discussion proper will begin at 7PM. ✨ • "White Tears is a book that everyone should be reading right now... the reverberations of this book echo long after it's done. Part ghost story, part travelogue, White Tears is a drugged-out, spoiled-rotten treatise on race, class, and poverty of the soul." – Claire Howorth, Time • #harikunzru #whitetears #litsyndicate (at Unabridged Bookstore)

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Tonight's the night, folks! Our book club meets this evening at 6:30 to discuss Hanif Abdurraqib's THEY CAN'T KILL US UNTIL THEY KILL US. Can't make it out this evening? Join us next month on MONDAY, March 5th, when we'll discuss Hari Kunzru's WHITE TEARS. • About the book: This hallucinatory, murder mystery/magical realist/ghost story novel is dark, razor sharp fiction with a social conscience. In its simplest form, WHITE TEARS is about two male friends, a blues recording, and the underbelly of record collecting. But the masterful Kunzru knows his history, and what emerges is an exploration of the exploitation of black culture by white profiteers and the collapse of the white hero mythology. Never preachy or polemicizing, WHITE TEARS is a compulsively readable, disturbing vision of what America is and what it always has been. The culminating effect of this novel is an eerie, reverberating chorus of voices from the past, voices of entitlement and ignorance, and voices that were never heard in the first place. • #litsyndicate #hanifabdurraqib #harikunzru #whitetears (at Unabridged Bookstore)

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Happy New Year, book babies. 🥂 What's that? Your New Year's resolution is to join a book club? We are here for you! The #litsyndicate will convene its first meeting of 2018 tomorrow evening (1/2) at 6:30PM to discuss Toni Morrison's devastating debut novel THE BLUEST EYE. Can't make it tomorrow night? Join us at our next meeting on Tuesday, February 6th when we'll discuss @nifmuhammad's urgent & much beloved collection of essays THEY CAN'T KILL US UNTIL THEY KILL US. ✨✨ (at Unabridged Bookstore)

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That's a wrap on our book club for 2017! Thanks to everyone who joins us at the #litsyndicate each month. Your perceptiveness and intelligence makes us proud of the community in which we have the privilege to sell books. Our first book of 2018 will be Toni Morrison's THE BLUEST EYE. Heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision, Morrison's debut novel is as relevant today as it was upon its original publication in 1970. We'll meet to discuss this modern classic on Tuesday, January 2nd at 6:30PM. Join us! #tonimorrison #thebluesteye (at Unabridged Bookstore)

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Behold, book club enthusiasts, November's #litsyndicate selection! SWALLOWING MERCURY is Wioletta Greg's celebrated debut novel. In it, Wiola reminisces about her youth in 1980s Poland. We'll discuss this sinister and beautiful book on Tuesday, December 5th at 6:30PM. Join us! 🇵🇱 #translatedtuesday #wiolettagreg #swallowingmercury (at Unabridged Bookstore)

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October's book club pick is Anuk Arudpragasam's THE STORY OF A BRIEF MARRIAGE. Ed calls this astonishing debut novel "an unflinching, visceral meditation on the stark cruelty of war, told in prose as devastating as it is beautiful. Our discussion will take place on Tuesday, November 7th at 6:30PM. We've got copies of the paperback on our shelves now. #litsyndicate #anukarudpragasam #thestoryofabriefmarriage (at Unabridged Bookstore)

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Happy Labor Day weekend, friends! A gentle reminder: The #litsyndicate meets this Tuesday, September 5th to discuss Stefan Hertmans' WAR & TURPENTINE. Join us! (at Unabridged Bookstore)

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"My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this." • A gentle 11th hour reminder: Our book club will meet tomorrow evening at 6:30 to discuss Jacqueline Woodson's ANOTHER BROOKLYN. #litsyndicate #jacquelinewoodson #anotherbrooklyn (at Unabridged Bookstore)

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Thanks to everyone who attended tonight's discussion of ANOTHER BROOKLYN! August's book club pick is Stefan Hertmans' WAR & TURPENTINE, a book Ed calls "real, raw, powerful, and heartbreaking, an evocation of a world lost to us irrevocably." We'll discuss Hertmans' critically lauded novel at 6:30 on Tuesday, September 5th. Join us! 🎨 #litsyndicate #stefanhertmans #warandturpentine #translatedtuesday (at Unabridged Bookstore)

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June's book club pick is Olivia Laing's THE LONELY CITY! Join us on Tuesday, July 11th at 6:30PM when we'll discuss this illuminating book on urban isolation and its complicated relationship to art and the Internet. 🌃 #litsyndicate #olivialaing #thelonelycity (at Unabridged Bookstore)