Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.
This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or at Malvern Books. (Call us on 512-322-2097 if you’d prefer curbside pick up.) We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.
February’s selection is Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, in a new translation from the Chinese by Bonnie Huie.
Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure.
Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend.
Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.
The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica and now has over 500 titles in print. NYRB Classics includes new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Dante, and Chekhov; fiction by contemporary masters such as Magda Szabó, Tove Jansson, William Gaddis, and Uwe Johnson; tales of crime and punishment by Dorothy B. Hughes and Kenneth Fearing, among others; masterpieces of narrative history, literary criticism, poetry, travel writing, biography, and memoirs from such writers as Eve Babitz, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Charles Simic; and unclassifiable classics on the order of J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85296324280?pwd=T1d4SVpuTTFqR1FhUXVmdHFQSGdvZz09
