About this Event
Solidarity Book Club: Decolonize Your Mind
January's Solidarity Pick is Recitatif by Toni Morrison with an introduction by Zadie Smith.
Join us for our third meeting for Solidarity Book Club: Decolonize Your Mind. This is a new, themed book club at Three Avenues Bookshop, where we'll meet 4 times per year to discuss selected titles, build community, and dismantle colonial systems.
Our third pick: by Toni Morrison.
🌟 IMPORTANT NOTE: Many readers report preferring to read Morrison's short story BEFORE reading Smith's introduction. We highly recommend reading in that order! The short story starts about halfway through the book. 🌟
Meeting Details
When: Monday, January 11th
What time: 6-7:30pm
Where: Beermiscuous
Get Your Book!
We've got copies of Recitatif in store, so come by anytime. To reserve your copy or have it shipped to you directly, place an order here.
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About the Book
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A beautiful, arresting story about race and the relationships that shape us through life by the legendary Nobel Prize winner. With an introduction by Zadie Smith
“A puzzle of a story, then—a game.... When [Morrison] called Recitatif an ‘experiment’ she meant it. The subject of the experiment is the reader.” —Zadie Smith, award-winning, best-selling author of White Teeth
In this 1983 short story—the only short story Morrison ever wrote—we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other's throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.
Another work of genius by this masterly writer, Recitatif keeps Twyla's and Roberta's races ambiguous throughout the story. Morrison herself described Recitatif, a story which will keep readers thinking and discussing for years to come, as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." We know that one is white and one is Black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage?
A remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and how perceptions are made tangible by reality, Recitatif is a gift to readers in these changing times.
About the Author
TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia, and two collections of essays, Changing My Mind and Feel Free. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002, and was listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013. White Teeth won multiple literary awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Event venue & nearby stays
Beermiscuous, 2812 North Lincoln Avenue, Chicago, United States
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