SUPPER CLUB

Name: SUPPER CLUB
Author: Lara Williams
ISBN: 978-0-525-53958-2

by Lara Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 2019

Williams’ debut novel will satisfy your craving for terrific writing and leave you hungry for more from this talented writer.

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Two young women launch a supper club that lets its female-only members embrace their appetites in British writer Williams' (A Selfie as Big as the Ritz, 2017) delicious first novel.

Before Roberta meets Stevie, she is disconnected, depressed, a person to whom life mostly happens, and not always in a good way. Having left the cozy home she shared with her mother for an urban university, she is disappointed to find herself not joyously liberated, as she had imagined she would be, but emotionally confined and isolated from her peers. To kill time, satisfy a hunger for comfort, and buffer herself from academic life and social interactions, she takes up cooking, spending hours in the kitchen of her shared flat conjuring increasingly elaborate dishes and then eagerly devouring them. Roberta lives furtively, apologetically, in time moving on to a generally solitary job at a fashion website. It is there she first encounters Stevie, an aspiring artist who is as free-spirited as Roberta is inhibited, and with whom she forms an immediate bond. “I liked Stevie so much I felt embarrassed….It was like falling in love,” Roberta muses as their friendship deepens, quickly transitioning into a roommate relationship with a distinctly “matrimonial dynamic,” with Roberta delighting in cooking for someone she cares about. Not long into their head-over-heels friendship, the young women hatch an idea that combines Roberta’s knack for cooking and Stevie’s artistic sensibilities and skill for forging social connections: They will form “Supper Club,” an initiative to intermittently bring together women in a bacchanalian celebration of appetite—for food, for connection, for breaking boundaries and occupying space and approaching life on their own terms, without asking permission or offering apology. Eventually, however, in the midst of these energetic enactments of emancipation, Roberta is compelled to confront and contend with the difficulties in her past—especially those related to men who have disappointed and degraded her—and decide where, for what, and with whom she stands. Mixing together insights about food and friendship, hunger and happiness, and the space women allot themselves in the world today, Williams writes with warmth, wit, and wisdom, serving up distinctive characters and a delectably unusual story.

Williams’ debut novel will satisfy your craving for terrific writing and leave you hungry for more from this talented writer.

Pub Date: July 9, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-525-53958-2

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ODYSSEY
by Lara Williams

- BOOK REVIEW
A SELFIE AS BIG AS THE RITZ
by Lara Williams

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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OF MICE AND MEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

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Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.