Los Angeles Literature Enthusiasts

For January, we'll be discussing No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood.

The book was finalist for the Booker Prize and a NYT Top 10 Book. Listed as one of the Atlantic's Great American Novels.

From Amazon: (https://amzn.to/4qFPwGw)

As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts.

When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void.

An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?"

Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.

The zoom link will be sent out the day before the event. We hope that you can join us. If so, please RSVP. If your plans change and you are no longer able to attend, please update your RSVP. No shows will be removed from the group.

Back by popular demand, for February we'll be discussing the gilded age classic House of Mirth by Edith Warton. Please join us for an interesting discussion.

From Amazon: (https://amzn.to/49YUl7Z)
Edith Wharton's novel, published in 1905, chronicles the story of Lily Bart, a well-bred but destitute woman from high society in New York City at the turn of the century. Wharton paints a picture of a lovely woman who, although being nurtured and trained to marry well both socially and economically, is approaching her 29th year, a time when her youthful blush is fading and her matrimonial choices are becoming increasingly limited.

For March, we'll be discussing Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward.
https://amzn.to/48E4KoC.

We hope you are able to join us for a lively discussion. To attend, please RSVP. If you do RSVP then find you're not able to make it, we ask that you update to not attending. No shows will be removed from the group.

From Amazon:
Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century and 10 Best Books of the Year by the NY Times and Winner of the National Book Award.

This majestic, stirring, and widely praised novel from Jesmyn Ward is the story of a family on a journey through rural Mississippi.

Jojo is 13 years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.

His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister’s lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her children’s father is White. She wants to be a better mother but can’t put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances.

When the children’s father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and the State Penitentiary. There there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.