Join us for readings to disrupt the patriarchy! Everyone is invited to take part in our Smashing! Read & Resist book club, a monthly discussion on works by women, women-identified, trans, and nonbinary writers, focusing on books from small and independent presses. Genres may vary!

*** This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “Smashing book club” in the subject line. ***

This month’s pick is Pain Studies by Lisa Olstein. This book can be purchased from our store (call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit) or online via our BookShop site: bookshop.org/a/2325/9781942658689.

In this extended lyric essay, a poet mines her lifelong experience with migraine to deliver a marvelously idiosyncratic cultural history of pain—how we experience, express, treat, and mistreat it. Her sources range from the trial of Joan of Arc to the essays of Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry to Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of Gregory House on House M.D. As she engages with science, philosophy, visual art, rock lyrics, and field notes from her own medical adventures (both mainstream and alternative), she finds a way to express the often-indescribable experience of living with pain. Eschewing simple epiphanies, Olstein instead gives us a new language to contemplate and empathize with a fundamental aspect of the human condition.

“Lisa Olstein’s remarkable Pain Studies is a book built of brain and nerve and blood and heart, about what it means to live with pain. Irreverent and astute, synthesizing the personal and the historical, popular culture and poetry and visual art, Pain Studies will change how you think about living with a body in our beautiful and doomed world.” —Elizabeth McCracken

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Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87489431110?pwd=a0ZsZDhSTVJQNmJZcGJVOGFkSWsrQT09

Meeting ID: 874 8943 1110
Passcode: 958060