Sunday, February 16, 2014

March Book

And the Mountains Echoed
by Khaled Hosseini

Sat. March 15, 10 a.m.
Coffee Traders
Karen's birthday!

Listen to Hosseini

Watch Hosseini

Visit the author's website.

Contribute to the author's foundation.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Feb. 2014 Book

The Orphan Master's Son
by Adam Johnson
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2012

Meeting: Sat. Feb. 15
10 a.m. Coffee Traders

READ MORE ABOUT THE BOOK & AUTHOR

Pulitzer Winner “The Orphan Master’s Son” Peers into North Korea’s Heart

Adam Johnson won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for The Orphan Master’s Son.

By Jonathan DeHart

April 18, 2013

Over the past few months, North Korea has hosted a surreal basketball “diplomacy” trip with Dennis Rodman, threatened war and held celebrations with flowers, missiles and music. But very few have an inkling of what the Hermit Kingdom is really like from the inside.

Stanford University professor of English Adam Johnson has made a very ambitious attempt to answer that question in his novel The Orphan Master’s Son, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction earlier this week. After an absence last year, literature buffs breathed a collective sigh of relief to see the award return this year. Previous winners include Nobel laureates Ernest Hemmingway (The Old Man and the Sea), John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath) and Toni Morrison (Beloved).

Johnson’s book has won near universal acclaim among critics, being called “exceedingly readable” in a review byThe New York Times, which took home several Pulitzers of its own. The Guardian also published a rave reviewof the book, comparing it to 1984 and Brave New World, in which the writer said that Johnson “managed to capture the atmosphere of this hermit kingdom better than any writer I've read.”

Adam Johnson on ‘The Orphan Master’s Son’

January 24, 2012 | by Karan Mahajan

On December 19, 2011, one of the main characters in Adam Johnson’s new novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, died. His name was Kim Jong Il. Had Kim lived, he might have approved of the impish, devious, and dangerously mercurial simulacrum that Johnson summons in his epic about modern North Korea, published by Random House this month. He may have been less pleased that an ordinary citizen named Jun Do usurps him as the hero of the book—springing from a labor camp in a doomed quest for freedom.

Johnson, who teaches fiction at Stanford’s Stegner Program and grew up in South Dakota and Arizona, has written about characters caught in dystopian settings before (he is the author of a short-story collection, Emporium, and a novel, Parasites Like Us) but never on such a grand scale or in such unfamiliar territory. Earlier this month I caught up with him by phone to ask how he came to write about North Korea, and about the perils of researching a place about which so little is known.

You spent seven years researching and writing this book and even visited North Korea once. Did you have an emotional reaction when you learned that Kim Jong Il had died?

The book was done. Kim Jong Il felt very alive to me when I was writing it, but of course that’s one of our illusions. I was really just filled with concern for twenty-four million people.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Dec./Jan. Book

The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt

Jan. 18
10 a.m.
MT Coffee Traders

The cult of Donna Tartt by Hannah Rosefield

When The Secret History was published in September 1992, hype had been building for months. The author, Donna Tartt, was 28. She had received a $450,000 advance. She was elegant and miniature (“I’m the exact same size as Lolita,” she told an interviewer) and enigmatic. She could recite poetry, even entire short stories, by heart. As an undergraduate, legendary writer and editor Willie Morris had read her work and approached her with the words, “My name’s Willie Morris, and I think you’re a genius.”

Tartt’s vogueish glamour was boosted by her connections to the “literary brat pack,” a young, East Coast group of writers ...Read More

Monday, October 21, 2013

November Book

The Lowlands

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Meeting:

Sat. Nov. 16

10 a.m. at Coffee Traders

Get to Know Lahiri:

The Atlantic interview

Read the wiki entry.

About The Lowlands

NY Times review

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

October Book

The Forgotten Garden
by Kate Morton

Buy from Amazon

Meeting

Sat. Oct. 19
10 a.m.
Coffee Traders

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Sept. Book

The Book:
The Casual Vacancy
by J.K. Rowling

Date: 9/21

Place: Coffee Traders

Time: 10 a.m.

Reading & Interview

New York Times Review

Darkness and Death, No Magic to Help
Book Review: ‘The Casual Vacancy’ by J. K. Rowling
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: September 27, 2012

With J.K. Rowling's new novel, “The Casual Vacancy,” we are firmly in Muggle-land — about as far from the enchanted world of Harry Potter as we can get. There is no magic in this book — in terms of wizarding or in terms of narrative sorcery. Instead, this novel for adults is filled with a variety of people like Harry’s aunt and uncle, Petunia and Vernon Dursley: self-absorbed, small-minded, snobbish and judgmental folks, whose stories neither engage nor transport us.

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