Riverstone Around the Globe Book Club - McCandless Crossing

Pittsburgh's premier independent bookstore, Riverstone Booksfeatures a well-curated selection of literary and popular fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books.  In addition, we offer a variety of gift items, greeting cards, and children’s puzzles, educational games, and literary stuffed animals. Our experienced booksellers are voracious readers who love to match people to books they will love.

Riverstone Books

Join us at our newest book club that focuses on books written by international authors.

8850 Covenant Ave

Riverstone Around the Globe is a new book club at McCandless Crossing which centralizes global literatures, works in translation, and highlights from the Booker and International Booker prizes. Whether you’re looking to broaden your literary horizons, or otherwise want to read novels you wouldn’t normally find all over social media, this book club is a great introduction to books outside the States.This book club is led by Riverstone bookseller, Sarah.Need to order a copy of the book? You can do so <a href="https://shop.riverstonebookstore.com/book/9780811237253" title="https://shop.riverstonebookstore.com/book/9780811237253" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">here</a>.About the book:Utterly riveting, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) is the grand opening of her speculative fiction septology, winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize (Scandinavia’s most important literary award) for being “a masterpiece of its time.”A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZELONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURETara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”)Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.The first volume’s gravitational pull—a force inverse to its constriction—has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”

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