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Wednesday, 12:30 pm EDT - 1:30 pm EDT April 19, 2023

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April 2023 Selection:
The Trees by Percival Everett

The Literarians is a free monthly discussion group open to members of The Center for Fiction. Led by our Head Librarian and Education Director, Allison Escoto, The Literarians read a wide variety of contemporary fiction selected by participants each month. Looking for recommendations? Browse their previous selections and RSVP above for the next discussion!

Members are welcome to join The Literarians throughout the year. Not a member yet? Join today!

Click Register above to RSVP for this month’s discussion. Questions? Please email Allison Escoto at [email protected].

everett-percival.trees-the

Led by

  • headshot

    Allison Escoto

    Head Librarian & Education Director

    Allison Escoto

    Head Librarian & Education Director

    New Yorker by way of New Orleans, Allison Escoto received her BA in Creative Writing from SUNY New Paltz and closed out the 90s as a bookseller in Greenwich Village. After several years in publishing, she pursued and received her MLS from Queens College. Since then she has worked as a librarian for 15 years in various libraries in and around NYC and has been moonlighting as a poet and copywriter. She reviews books for Booklist and serves on the ALA RUSA Notables committee. From 2017-2020, she was the Associate Editor for Newtown Literary Journal, a publication dedicated to featuring writers from her beloved Queens.

2023 Selections

  1. . 
    everett-percival.trees-the

    The Trees

    By Percival Everett

    Published by Graywolf Press

    PURCHASE

    April 2023 Selection

    Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.

    The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.

  2. . 
    9780593534663

    The Rabbit Hutch

    By Tess Gunty

    Published by Knopf Doubleday

    PURCHASE

    March 2023 Selection

    An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents—neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana.

    Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch.

    Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives.

    Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom.

    . 
    9780593534663
  3. . 
    9780593541883

    Afterlives

    By Abdulrazak Gurnah

    Published by Penguin

    PURCHASE

    February 2023 Selection

    When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back–until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya. As these young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.

About this series

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