December, 2009 - Winter Break - No Selection

January, 2010

A Question of Freedom
R. Dwayne Betts

Discussion Period: TBA

A Question of Freedom is a coming-of-age story, with the unique twist that it takes place in prison. Utterly alone—and with the growing realization that he really is not going home any time soon—the author confronts profound questions about violence, freedom, crime, race, and the justice system. Above all, A Question of Freedom is about a quest for identity—one that guarantees his survival in a hostile environment and that incorporates an understanding of how his own past led to the moment of his crime. The Baltimore Times calls A Question of Freedom "a must-read and should be required reading for all those young sons and grandsons and brothers and nephews and uncles who believe this can't happen to them; it can, even if they can't wrap their brains around such a concept."

February, 2010

Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife
Francine Prose

Discussion Period: TBA

How has the life and death of one girl become emblematic of the lives and deaths of so many, and why do her words continue to inspire? Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife tells the extraordinary story of the book that became a force in the world. Along the way, Francine Prose definitively establishes that Anne Frank was not an accidental author or a casual teenaged chronicler, but a writer of prodigious talent and ambition.

February, 2010

This Clumsy Living
Bob Hicok

Discussion Period: TBA

This Clumsy Living is perhaps Hicok's most obscure and mature book to date. Most notably, and with a heightened political consciousness in tow, these poems meditate on the tyranny of the human condition in the early twenty-first century. More than a few ponder the war in Iraq, while another, “Switching to deer time,” considers other atrocities and draws connections to events discussed in prior poems. "The arrival of This Clumsy Living is cause for celebration, as it firmly places [Hicok] among a collection of astute poets with a keen eye for both the common and the extraordinary, and confirms these poems, at turns playful and disturbing though always emotionally charged, as some of the finest being written today." (American Book Review)

March, 2010

The Dead Fish Museum
Charles D'Ambrosio

Discussion Period: TBA

Each of these eight burnished, terrifying, masterfully crafted stories is set against a landscape that is both deeply American and unmistakably universal. Taking place in remote cabins, asylums, Indian reservations, and the streets of Seattle, this collection of stories, as muscular and challenging as the best novels, is about people who have been orphaned, who have lost connection, and who have exhausted the ability to generate meaning in their lives. Yet in the midst of lacerating difficulty, the sensibility at work in these fictions boldly insists on the enduring power of love. “D’Ambrosio spins out descriptive lines or dialogue strong enough to lift the entire edifice of a story with a shudder.” (Chicago Tribune)