Yale Book Club

The next Yale Book Club meeting is 7 p.m. Sunday, November 8, 2009. Our book is John Kessel's The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (2008), which is available in paperback at Amazon.com and book stores. Professor Kessel will join us as our guest.

John Kessel's stories have won the Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and Tiptree Awards. His books include Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and collections The Pure Product and Meeting in Infinity (a New York Times Notable Book). Kessel and his family live in Raleigh, N.C., where he co-directs the creative writing program at North Carolina State University.

One reviewer has written, "John Kessel's writing exists at the edge of things, in the dark corner where the fiction section abuts the science-fiction shelves, in the hyphen where magic meets realism. Reading Kessel's wonderful fabulations is like staying out too late partying and seeing strange angels while stumbling home in the dawn's first light. This is one of those too rare short story collections that you can recommend with confidence to both the literary snob and the hard-core computer geek."

Please RSVP to fherndon1@nc.rr.com. New members are always welcome.

Please bring something to share -- drinks, snacks, desserts. Also, since we would like to offer Professor Kessel an honorarium, we are asking for contributions of $5 per person for this event.

Location: home of Faith Herndon, 4209 New Bern Place, Durham, N.C. (tel. 417 9758 or 403-9348). Please note that the best route involves turning off of Garrett Road (north of Jordan High School) onto Colorado and then following the map to Faith's house. Mapquest and GPS directions are not reliable in that they often direct drivers to turn off Garrett onto Swarthmore, which unfortunately does not go through to Faith's neighborhood.

Please RSVP or send any questions to: faith@faithlaw.net or calnordt@aol.com.

-Faith Herndon

Announcing the 2009-2010 schedule for the Yale Book Club

We have a diverse selection that includes science fiction, new fiction, a classic American novel, non-fiction, and fabulous travel writing. Please notice that we've scheduled six meetings through November 2010. (All meetings are at 7 p.m.; locations will be updated as they are determined.)

Sunday, January 31, 2010 - Arvind Adiga, White Tiger (2008). Winner of the Man Booker Prize. Location to be announced.
White Tiger is Adiga's first novel, but don't let that put you off. "Darkly comic ... Balram's appealingly sardonic voice and acute observations of the social order are both winning and unsettling."
- The New Yorker
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/14/booker-prize-adiga-white-tiger

Sunday, April 11, 2010 - W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941). Location to be announced.
Oxford American Magazine lists Mind of the South as one of best five southern non-fiction books of all time. This slim volume has been recognized as a path-breaking work of scholarship and a literary achievement. Cash's book has shaped how millions of readers saw the South for decades.

Sunday, June 18, 2010 - Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar (2008). Location to be announced.

Sunday, September 19, 2010 - William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930). Location to be announced.
As I Lay Dying recounts a family's trip by a mule-pulled wagon to bury their mother, Addie. No one can do existential angst like Faulkner, and this alternately tragic and comic journey is one of Faulkner's and American literature's greatest novels.

Sunday, November 14, 2010 - Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (2008). Location to be announced.
Winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction. "Netherland is suspenseful, artful, psychologically pitch-perfect, and a wonderful read. But more than any of that, it's revelatory. Joseph O'Neill has managed to paint the most famous city in the world, and the most familiar concept in the world (love) in an entirely new way."
- Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated

"Here's what Netherland surely is: the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell."
- NY Times Book Review