What we’re about
Welcome all! This is a reading club that requires a little less commitment than traditional ones (plus, short stories are great). We'll be choosing a short story collection each month and meeting to discuss it in an informal setting over beverages.
Feel free to read the entire collection or just a few stories, whatever you have time for! We can talk about individual pieces or simply the general vibe of the collection. Let's bring together readers and make some new friends :)
Upcoming events (1)
See all- January Meeting: 'Pemi Aguda - GhostrootsSante Adairius Rustic Ales Oakland Arbor, Oakland, CA
Recommended Stories:
- Manifest (22pp) (1-22) (read online at Granta here)
- The Hollow (16pp) (51-66) (read online at Zoetrope here)
- Masquerade Season (16pp) (189-204) (read online at Reactor here)
Note: meeting on the third Wednesday this month (the 15th)
Other links for stories in this collection (from the author's homepage):- Things Boys Do in Nightmare Magazine
- Contributions in American Short Fiction
- Birdwoman in Omenana Magazine
Sorry for not doing our due diligence on library availability this month; this collection is pretty hot and hard to get. Thankfully, 6 of the 12 stories are available online to read at the links above.
Buckle up for what promises to be another wild collection of speculative fiction short stories! A debut from Nigerian author 'Pemi Aguda that's a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction and popping up on best-of lists all over the place. Looking forward to starting the new year off with this one! -Ben
For First-Timers: We recommend reading at least one story in the collection, but feel free to read as little or as much as you'd like! Discussion is open, informal, and covers the whole collection, but we try to focus on the recommended stories listed above.
About the collection:
In this beguiling collection of twelve imaginative stories set in Lagos, Nigeria, ’Pemi Aguda dramatizes the tension between our yearning to be individuals and the ways we are haunted by what came before. These stories in Ghostroots map emotional and physical worlds that lay bare the forces of family, myth, tradition, gender, and modernity in Nigerian society. Powered by a deep empathy and glinting with humor, they announce a major new literary talent.
