Books Over Brunch – the Subplot.

A creative place where people who love words come together and explore their love of literature in all its forms. The group decides where that exploration will lead! 

Sunday, 3rd January 2021. 11am.

The Old Man and the Sea. Ernest Hemingway.

Online event: https://meet.google.com/foc-qvzd-xvf

The Old Man and the Sea tells the story of a battle between an aging, experienced fisherman, Santiago, and a large marlin. The story opens with Santiago having gone 84 days without catching a fish, and now being seen as “salao”, the worst form of unluckiness.

Sunday, 31st January 2021. 11am.

Close Range: Wyoming Stories. A collection of short stories by E. Annie Proulx

Online event: https://meet.google.com/foc-qvzd-xvf

Close Range: Wyoming Stories is a 1999 collection of short stories by E. Annie Proulx, beginning in 1997. The stories are set in the desolate landscape of rural Wyoming and detail the often grim lives of the protagonists.

The collection was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The best known story from the collection is “Brokeback Mountain”, which was previously published as a 64-page novella in 1998. The story was the basis for Ang Lee’s 2005 film, Brokeback Mountain.

The volume includes 11 short stories.

Sunday, 28th February 2021. 11am

No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Online event: https://meet.google.com/foc-qvzd-xvf

Video and audio participation is encouraged.

No One Writes to the Colonel (Spanish: El coronel no tiene quien le escriba) is a novella written by the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It also gives its name to a short story collection. García Márquez considered it his best book, saying that he had to write One Hundred Years of Solitude so that people would read No One Writes to the Colonel.

The novel, written between 1956 and 1957 while living in Paris in the Hotel des Trois Colleges  and first published in 1961, is the story of an impoverished, retired colonel, a veteran of the Thousand Days’ War, who still hopes to receive the pension he was promised some fifteen years earlier. The colonel lives with his asthmatic wife in a small village under martial law. The action opens with the colonel preparing to go to the funeral of a town musician whose death is notable because he was the first to die from natural causes in many years. The novel is set during the years of “La Violencia” in Colombia, when martial law and censorship prevail.

Sunday 28th March 2021 at 11am.

No Art: Poems by Ben Lerner

Online event: https://meet.google.com/foc-qvzd-xvf

Video and audio participation only.

This book brings together for the first time Ben Lerner’s three acclaimed volumes of poetry, along with a handful of newer poems, to present a decade-long exploration of the relationship between form and meaning, between private experience and public expression. No Art is an exhilarating argument both with America and with poetry itself, in which online slang is juxtaposed with academic idiom, philosophy collides with advertising, and the language of medicine and the military is overlaid with echoes of Whitman and Keats. Here, clichs are cracked open and made new, made strange, and formal experiments disclose new possibilities of thought and feeling. No Art confirms Ben Lerner as one of the most searching and ambitious poets working today.

We are privileged to welcome a special guest to this event. Donat Bayer translated No Art into Turkish and has worked very closely with Ben Lerner. We look forward to meeting him and to hear his interpretation of Ben Lerner’s pioneering poetry.

In an exclusive interview for K24, Ben Lerner answered questions by Donat Bayer, the Turkish translator of Lerner’s book of collected poems, “No Art” https://t24.com.tr/k24/yazi/ben-lerner-soylesi-en,2488

Donat recommends the following poems to read in advance of the event:

  1. If it hangs from the wall (p. 48)
  2. Pleasure is a profoundly negative experience (p. 18)
  3. Announcing a late style (p. 24)
  4. Beauty cannot account for (p. 26)
  5. The average reader (p. 42)

    The last two are alternative suggestions.

Sunday 25th April 2021 at 11am.

Miguel Street, V.S. Naipaul

Online event: https://meet.google.com/foc-qvzd-xvf

Video and audio participation only.

Miguel Street is a collection of linked short stories by V. S. Naipaul set in wartime Trinidad and Tobago. The stories draw on the author’s childhood memories of Port of Spain. The author lived with his family in the Woodbrook district of the city in the 1940s, and the street in question, Luis Street, has been taken to be the model of Miguel Street. Some of the inhabitants are members of the Hindu community to which Naipaul belonged. Naipaul also draws on wider Trinidadian culture, referring to cricket and quoting a number of lyrics by black calypso singers.

Sunday 23rd May 2021 at 11am.

A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James

James’s impressive third novel sets the attempted assassination of Bob Marley against the cacophony and violence of Jamaica as the CIA moved in.
James’s novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, tells the story of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, who is referred to throughout as “the singer”, and its aftermath. But perhaps more importantly, it tells the story of Jamaica in the 1970s and early 80s, when the guns flooded in, CIA agents took up residence, and the island went through one of its most violently defining moments. It is a story worth telling, and a story about Jamaica that doesn’t only take place in Jamaica.

From the acclaimed author of The Book of Night Women comes a dazzling display of masterful storytelling exploring this near-mythic event. Spanning three decades and crossing continents, A Brief History of Seven Killings chronicles the lives of a host of unforgettable characters – slum kids, one-night stands, drug lords, girlfriends, gunmen, journalists, and even the CIA. Gripping and inventive, ambitious and mesmerising, A Brief History of Seven Killings is one of the most remarkable and extraordinary novels of the twenty-first century.