Short Story Book Club "Liberation Day" by George Saunders

The Short Story Book Club led by Bryn Durgin. This month’s selection is “Liberation Day” by George Saunders.

In this monthly book club dedicated to reading collections of short stories, April’s pick is Liberation Day , George Saunders’ masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans.
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 store at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $28 which includes your copy of Liberation Day to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.
About Liberation Day :
The “best short-story writer in English” (Time) is back. With his trademark prose–wickedly funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely tuned–Saunders continues to challenge and surprise. Liberation Day is a collection of prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.
“Love Letter” is a tender missive from grandfather to grandson, in the midst of a dystopian political situation in the (not too distant, all too believable) future, that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and one another. “Ghoul” is set in a Hell-themed section of an underground amusement park in Colorado and follows the exploits of a lonely, morally complex character named Brian, who comes to question everything he takes for granted about his reality. In “Mother’s Day,” two women who loved the same man come to an existential reckoning in the middle of a hailstorm. In “Elliott Spencer,” our eighty-nine-year-old protagonist finds himself brainwashed, his memory “scraped”–a victim of a scheme in which poor, vulnerable people are reprogrammed and deployed as political protesters. And “My House”–in a mere seven pages–comes to terms with the haunting nature of unfulfilled dreams and the inevitability of decay.
Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances.
George Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven books, including A Swim in a Pond in the Rain ; Lincoln in the Bardo , which won the Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the way ; Tenth of December , a finalist for the National Book Award; The Braindead Megaphone ; and the critically acclaimed collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline , Pastoralia , and In Persuasion Nation . He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
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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/