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MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8 – 7PM
BOOKCOURT’S BookClub Meeting
LARK AND TERMITE by JAYNE PHILLIPS
Please join us for a discussion!
Lark and Termite is a rich, wonderfully alive novel about seventeen year old Lark and her brother, Termite, living in West Virginia in the 1950s. Their mother, Lola, is absent, while their aunt, Nonie, raises them as her own, and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, is caught up in the early days of the Korean War. Award-winning author Jayne Anne Phillips intertwines family secrets, dreams, and ghosts in a story about the love that unites us all.
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TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9 – 7PM
AMY BLOOM - WHERE THE GOD OF LOVE HANGS OUT
Love, in its many forms and complexities, weaves through this collection by Amy Bloom, the New York Times bestselling author of Away. Bloom’s astonishing and astute new work of interconnected stories illuminates the mysteries of passion, family, and friendship.
Propelled by Bloom’s dazzling prose, unmistakable voice, and generous wit, Where the God of Love Hangs Out takes us to the margins and the centers of real people’s lives, exploring the changes that love and loss create. A young woman is haunted by her roommate’s murder; a man and his daughter-in-law confess their sins in the unlikeliest of places. In one quartet of interlocking stories, two middle-aged friends, married to others, find themselves surprisingly drawn to each other, risking all while never underestimating the cost. In another linked set of stories, we follow mother and son for thirty years as their small and uncertain family becomes an irresistible tribe.
Insightful, sensuous, and heartbreaking, these stories of passion and disappointment, life and death, capture deep human truths. As The New Yorker has said, “Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books.”
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THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11 – 7PM
DON DELILLO – POINT OMEGA
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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12 – 7PM
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TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16 – 7PM
LESLIE JAMISON – THE GIN CLOSET
The Gin Closet is a stunning debut novel about broken families, mended trust, poverty, privilege, and the sheer and inescapable brutality of love.
After a slew of family fights, teenager Tilly Rudolph abandons her middleclass home in the suburbs and flees to the seedy underworld of Reno. She scrapes to get by, working as a prostitute and nursing various addictions, eventually drinking herself to the brink of death in a dusty trailer park. One day, after Tilly spends nearly thirty years without a family, her niece, a young cosmopolite from New York, shows up on her doorstep and changes both their lives forever.
The Gin Closet unravels the strange and powerful intimacy that forms between Tilly and her niece Stella. Its narration shifts between their perspectives as they move to San Francisco to make a home with Abe, Tilly’s overworked and melancholic son, building a fragile triangle that soon breaks under its own weight.
With an uncanny ear for dialogue and a witty, unflinching candor about sex, love, and power, Leslie Jamison writes achingly about the cruelties that unhinge us, the beauties that clarify us, the addictions that deform us, those fleeting possibilities of grace that fade as quickly as they come. The Gin Closet marks the debut of a stunning new talent in fiction.
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THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18 – 7PM
SEAN QUALLS – LITTLE CLOUD AND LADY WIND
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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 19 – 7PM
PETER STRAUB – A DARK MATTER
The charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru in the 1960s, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favors of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body—and the shattered souls of all who were present.
Years later, one man attempts to understand what happened to his wife and to his friends by writing a book about this horrible night, and it’s through this process that they begin to examine the unspeakable events that have bound them in ways they cannot fathom, but that have haunted every one of them through their lives. As each of the old friends tries to come to grips with the darkness of the past, they find themselves face-to-face with the evil triggered so many years earlier. Unfolding through the individual stories of the fated group’s members, A Dark Matter is an electric, chilling, and unpredictable novel that will satisfy Peter Straub’s many ardent fans, and win him legions more.
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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20 – 1PM
Thomas Keller shares family-style recipes that you can make any or every day.
In the book every home cook has been waiting for, the revered Thomas Keller turns his imagination to the American comfort foods closest to his heart…flaky biscuits, chicken pot pies, New England clam bakes, and cherry pies so delicious and redolent of childhood that they give Proust’s madeleines a run for their money. Keller, whose restaurants The French Laundry in Yountville, California, and Per Se in New York have revolutionized American haute cuisine, is equally adept at turning out simpler fare.
In Ad Hoc at Home…a cookbook inspired by the menu of his casual restaurant Ad Hoc in Yountville…he showcases more than 200 recipes for family-style meals. This is Keller at his most playful, serving up such truck-stop classics as Potato Hash with Bacon and Melted Onions and grilled-cheese sandwiches, and heartier fare including beef Stroganoff and roasted spring leg of lamb. In fun, full-color photographs, the great chef gives step-by-step lessons in kitchen basics… here is Keller teaching how to perfectly shape a basic hamburger, truss a chicken, or dress a salad. Best of all, where Keller’s previous best-selling cookbooks were for the ambitious advanced cook, Ad Hoc at Home is filled with quicker and easier recipes that will be embraced by both kitchen novices and more experienced cooks who want the ultimate recipes for American comfort-food classics.
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SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21 – 11AM
RANDALL DE SEVE – MATHILDA AND THE ORANGE BALLOON
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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24 – 7PM
JEFF GARLIN – MY FOOTPRINT: Carrying The Weight of the World
INTRODUCED by JONATHAN AMES
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SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 28 – 11AM
SERGIO RUZZIER – HEY RABBIT!
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TUESDAY, MARCH 2 – 7PM
ANTONINO D’AMBROSIO –
A HEARTBEAT AND A GUITAR: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears
“This book is a truly fascinating journey, charting the historical and social context of a courageous musical statement by one of our greatest rebel voices. It has since been locked away in the ‘denial drawer’ (aren’t First Nations people just an extinct species, systematically exterminated by European ‘progress’?), but D’Ambrosio admirably shines his investigative lantern into every darkened corner, finally offering some greatly appreciated illumination.” — Jim Jarmusch, filmmaker
“Antonino D’Ambrosio’s book on the making of Johnny Cash’s album “Bitter Tears” is much more than the story behind those extraordinary songs. It is a rich history, not only of Johnny Cash’s life, but of the Indian struggle for justice, which inspired Peter La Farge to write the song ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’ and Cash to sing it. The book is full of fascinating character sketches of the great folk singers of the Sixties, and their part in the social movements of that exciting era. I believe D’Ambrosio has made an important contribution to the cultural history of our time.” – Howard Zinn
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WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3 – 7PM
SIMON VAN BOOY – THE SECRET LIVES OF PEOPLE IN LOVE
The Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of grace, intensity, atmosphere, and compassion. Love, loss, frailty, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy’s themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.
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THURSDAY, MARCH 4 – 7PM
Tim Welch is a popular history teacher at the Montague Academy, an exclusive private school in Brooklyn Heights. As he says, “I was an odd-looking, gawky kid but I like to think my rocky start forced me to develop empathy, kindness, and a tendency to be enthusiastic. All of this, I’m now convinced, helped in my quest to be worthy of Kate Oliver.” Now, Kate is not inherently ordinary. But she aspires to be. She stays home with their two young sons in a modest apartment trying desperately to become the parent she never had. They are seemingly the last middle-class family in the Heights, whose world is turned upside down by Anna Brody, the new neighbor who moves into the most expensive brownstone in Brooklyn, sending the local society into a tailspin.
Anna is not only beautiful and wealthy; she’s also mysterious. And for reasons Kate doesn’t quite understand, even as all the Range Rover- driving moms jockey for invitations into Anna’s circle, Anna sets her sights on Kate and Tim and brings them into her world.
Like Tom Perrotta, Peter Hedges has a keen eye for the surprising truths of daily life. The Heights is at once light of touch and packed with emotion and depth of character.
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FRIDAY, MARCH 5 – 7PM
HELEN SIMONSON – MAJOR PETTIGREW’S LAST STAND
You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family. Among them is Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson’s wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, Major Pettigrew is one of the most indelible characters in contemporary fiction, and from the very first page of this remarkable novel he will steal your heart.
The Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother’s death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and her as the permanent foreigner. Can their relationship survive the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of culture and tradition?
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SUNDAY, MARCH 7 – 11AM
SARAH LAMSTEIN -BIG NIGHT FOR SALAMANDERS
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THURSDAY, MARCH 11 – 7PM
THIS MONTH’S READING FEATURES: NINA HERZOG
SARAH LANGAN
STACY MORRISON
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FRIDAY, MARCH 12 – 7PM
SAM LIPSYTE – THE ASK
Milo Burke, a development officer at a third-tier university, has “not been developing”: after a run-in with a well-connected undergrad, he finds himself among the burgeoning class of the newly unemployed. Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is offered one last chance by his former employer: he must reel in a potential donor—a major “ask”—who, mysteriously, has requested Milo’s involvement. But it turns out that the ask is Milo’s sinister college classmate Purdy Stuart. And the “give” won’t come cheap. Probing many themes— or, perhaps, anxieties—including work, war, sex, class, child rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, and the eroticization of chicken wire, The Ask is a burst of genius by a young American master who has already demonstrated that the truly provocative and important fictions are often the funniest ones.
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MONDAY, MARCH 15 – 7PM
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THURSDAY, MARCH 18 – 7PM
Mama was “no macaroni-necklace-wearing kind of mother.” She was a lipstick and perfume-wearing mother, a flirt whose estranged husband still hungered for her. After Mama threw him out, she warned the girls to never let Daddy in the house, an admonition that tears at ten-year-old Lulu whenever she thinks about the day she opened the door for her drunken father, and watched as he killed her mother, stabbed her five-year-old sister Merry and tried to take his own life.
Effectively orphaned by their mother’s death and father’s imprisonment, Lulu and Merry, unwanted by family members and abandoned to a terrifying group home, spend their young lives carrying more than just the visible scars from the tragedy. Even as their plan to be taken in by a well-to-do foster family succeeds, they come to learn they’ll never really belong anywhere or to anyone—that all they have to hold onto is each other.
As they grow into women, Lulu holds fast to her anger, denies her father’s existence and forces Merry into a web of lies about his death that eventually ensnares her own husband and daughters. Merry, certain their safety rests on placating her needy father, dutifully visits him, seeking his approval and love at the expense of her own relationships. As they strive to carve lives of their own, thespecter of their father, unrepentant and manipulative even from behind bars, haunts them. And when they learn he’s about to be paroled, the house of cards they’ve built their lives on teeters on the brink of collapse.
