Welcome to Annotated, a Bookends & Beginnings book club! We focus on genre-bending, boundary-pushing fiction in bite-sized packages: 150 or fewer pages. All selected titles are written by women or gender-queer authors and are read in translation.
This month, we'll be reading Mark Hutchinson's translation of A Leopard-Skin Hat. Hailed in Le Point as a ‘masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance,’ it is the story of an intense friendship between the Narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny. A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel.
All book club attendees are required to register through Eventbrite. Registration includes a copy of the month's title at a 10% discount off list price. The meeting will run from 6:00-7:00 PM, with a Happy Hour from 5:00-6:00 that attendees are encouraged to attend. For this event, our Happy Hour special is buy one, get one 50% off on all cocktails.
About Annotated: If your shelves are studded with NYRB and Fitzcarraldo titles, this is the book club for you. Rather than looking for the next big thing, we're more interested in what's too often overlooked: underrepresented voices, sleeper classics, and the books that get under your skin. Form can be fluid, and some Annotated selecions may lean more towards poetry, memoir, or narrative non-fiction, but the majority will be fiction. Group members are always encouraged to suggest titles! We believe that a good education is an expansive one, and as such, we commit to choosing books by writers from different regions, literary traditions, and backgrounds.
Annotated Book Club meetings are led by Molly, the Events and Marketing Coordinator at Bookends & Beginnings.
