Type: Book club

The Short Story Book Club led by Bryn Durgin. This month’s selection is “Seasons of Purgatory” by Shahriar Mandanipour

In this monthly book club dedicated to reading collections of short stories, March’s pick is Seasons of Purgatory , the first English-language story collection from Shahriar Mandanipour, “one of Iran’s most important living fiction writers” ( The Guardian ).
The benefit of our Short Story Book Club: If you only read one or two of the stories, you can still meaningfully participate and not worry about spoiling a book you’re only halfway through. If you’re not wild about one short story between the covers, chances are that you’ll find at least one with which you’ll fall in love.
We will meet in person at our new store location at 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $17 which includes your copy of Seasons of Purgatory to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.
About Seasons of Purgatory :
In Seasons of Purgatory , the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.
Shahriar Mandanipou r is an award-winning, exiled Iranian author and journalist who served in the Iran-Iraq war. His fiction has been published throughout the world, including two acclaimed novels published in English and the story collection Seasons of Purgatory . In 2006, Mandanipour moved to the United States, where he became a citizen in 2021. He has held fellowships at Brown University, Harvard University, and Boston College and has taught at Brown University and Tufts University. He lives in California.
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All signed up and unable to go? Please let us know! Seating is limited and there may be people on our waitlist who would like to to take your place. Please send an email to bryn@sarasotabooks.com ASAP and hopefully we’ll see you next time.
Click here to go to the Bookstore1Sarasota website:https://www.sarasotabooks.com/

The Poetry Book Club led by Doug Knowlton. March’s selection is “The Rupture Tense” by Jenny Xie

This monthly book club led by Doug is for those who like to read and discuss poetry. It celebrates the integral role of poets and poetry in life and literature. March’s selection is The Rupture Tense , the astounding second collection by Jenny Xie, “a magician of perspective and scale” ( The New Yorker ).
We will meet in person at our new store location at 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $17 which includes a copy of The Rupture Tense to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.
About Rupture Tense:
Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Jenny Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, memory—historical, collective, personal—stains and erodes. Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged.

The Rupture Tense begins with poems provoked by the photography of Li Zhensheng, whose negatives, hidden under his floorboards to avoid government seizure, provide one of the few surviving visual archives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and concludes with an aching elegy for the poet’s grandmother, who took her own life shortly after the end of the Revolution. This extraordinary collection records the aftershocks and long distances between those years and the present, echoing out toward the ongoing past and a trembling future.
Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level , a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award and winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Bard College and lives in New York City.
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All signed up and unable to go? Please let us know! Seating is limited and there may be people on our waitlist who would like to to take your place. Please send an email to bryn@sarasotabooks.com ASAP and hopefully we’ll see you next time.
Click here to go to the Bookstore1 Sarasota website. https://www.sarasotabooks.com/

The Mysteries to Die For Book Club Vintage Edition. March’s selection is “The Son” by Jo Nesbø

This monthly book club led by Elsie Souza is dedicated to reading vintage mystery novels. March’s pick is The Son by Jo Nesbø, an electrifying tale of vengeance set amid Oslo’s brutal hierarchy of corruption.
We will meet in person at our store location at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $18, including a copy of The Son to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.
About The Son :
Sonny Lofthus has been in prison for almost half his life: serving time for crimes he didn’t commit. In exchange, he gets an uninterrupted supply of heroin–and a stream of fellow prisoners seeking his Buddha-like absolution. Years earlier Sonny’s father, a corrupt cop, took his own life rather than face exposure. When Sonny discovers a shocking truth about his father’s suicide, he makes a brilliant escape and begins hunting down the people responsible. But he’s also being hunted–by enemies too numerous to count.
About the author:
Jo Nesbø is a musician, songwriter, economist, and author. He has won the Glass Key award for the best Nordic crime novel. His Harry Hole novels include The Redeemer, The Snowman, The Leopard, Phantom, and most recently Knife, and he is also the author of Headhunters, Macbeth, and several children’s books.
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All signed up and unable to go? Please let us know! Seating is limited and there may be people on our waitlist who would like to take your place. Please email bryn@sarasotabooks.com ASAP and hopefully, we’ll see you next time.
Click here to go to the Bookstore1Sarasota website: https://www.sarasotabooks.com/

The Refusal Camp Stories Book Launch!

In his first-ever short story collection, the award-winning author of the Billy Boyle World War II mysteries presents an eclectic mix of new and previously published mystery stories rife with historical detail and riveting wartime storytelling.
The Refusal Stories will be published on March 14th. Pre-order a copy here : https://shop.sarasotabooks.com/go/9781641294515.
About the book:
These dazzling stories show a crime fiction veteran at the height of his career.
“The Horse Chestnut Tree” explores betrayal and murder during the American Revolution. In the speculative work “Glass,” an atomic supercollider and the breakdown of the time-space continuum change the lives of two cousins devoured by greed. “Vengeance Weapon,” a historical thriller about an enslaved Jewish laborer working at the Dora concentration camp, looks at how far someone will go to get revenge. And for his Billy Boyle fans, Benn delivers “Irish Tommy,” a police procedural set in 1944 Boston featuring Billy’s father and uncle.
About the author:
James R. Benn is the author of the Billy Boyle World War II mysteries. The debut, Billy Boyle , was named one of five top mysteries of the year by Book Sense and was a Dilys Award nominee, A Blind Goddess was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, The Rest Is Silence was a Barry Award nominee, and The Devouring was a Macavity Award nominee. Benn, a former librarian, lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida with his wife, Deborah Mandel. Read more about James R. Benn here: https://www.jamesrbenn.com/index.htm.
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This free in-person event is in the Loft at our store at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple.
Registration will end 1 hour before the event’s scheduled time.
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All signed up and unable to go? Please let us know! Seating is limited and there may be people on our waitlist who would like to to take your place. Please send an email to bryn@sarasotabooks.com ASAP and hopefully we’ll see you next time.
Click to go to the Bookstore1Sarasota website: https://www.sarasotabooks.com/.

The Banned Book Club led by Bryn Durgin. March’s selection is “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou.

In this monthly book club dedicated to reading and protecting the most important and threatened books for our generation, March’s pick is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , Maya Angelou’s debut memoir, a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
We will meet in person at our store location at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $15 which includes a copy of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.
About I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings :
Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sing s captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.
Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.
“ I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity.”—James Baldwin
About the Author:
Maya Angelou was raised in Stamps, Arkansas. In addition to her bestselling autobiographies, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Heart of a Woman , she wrote numerous volumes of poetry, among them Phenomenal Woman , And Still I Rise , On the Pulse of Morning , and Mother. Maya Angelou died in 2014.
About Book Bans:
Book bans in public schools have recurred throughout American history, and remain an issue of concern to us at Bookstore1Sarasota. Over the past year, the scope of such censorship has expanded rapidly. In response, PEN America has collated an Index of School Book Bans, offering a snapshot of the trend. The index documents decisions to ban books in school libraries and classrooms in the U.S. from July 1, 2021 to March 31, 2022. Check it out and join us in our efforts to protect free expression and students’ first amendment rights. You can view the index here .
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All signed up and unable to go? Please let us know! Seating is limited and there may be people on our waitlist who would like to to take your place. Please send an email to bryn@sarasotabooks.com ASAP and hopefully we’ll see you next time.
Click here to go to the Bookstore1Sarasota website: https://www.sarasotabooks.com/.