Travel Bug Book Group

Travel Bug Book Group
Tuesday, Dec 2
5:30-7:00pm

Please join us to discuss Percival Everett’s Telephone A Novel

• 2021 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Fiction

Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area—the geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon—he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches.

After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter’s slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he’s ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission.

A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is the Percival Everett novel that will shake you to the core—as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.

• “It is taut, affecting and typically idiosyncratic. At its heart is the wrenching story of a middle-aged couple dealing with the sudden onset of their adolescent daughter's degenerative illness. But it is also a campus novel and a Trump-era, borderland thriller, and these unlikely modulations cohere in compelling fashion ... one of the author's best novels, amid a welter of competition. It should be widely read. And so, more generally, should Percival Everett.” —Arin Keeble (The Times Literary Supplement UK)

Everyone welcome! A glass of beer or wine on us!

Discussion group is hosted in Travel Bug the first Tuesday of the month by Aimee Gwynne Franklyn.

Aimee Gwynne Franklyn is an independent curator, art consultant and producer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her ongoing research focuses on the community benefits of public art, interdisciplinary
collaboration, art-making as a transformative tool for healing PTSD, and the critical role arts education plays in reducing recidivism in the carceral system.