Fiction Book Group

Fiction Book Group with Alexis

Discusses The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs and Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire, translated by Theo Cuffe

Led by former Greenlight general manager Alexis, our Fiction Book Group meets monthly to discuss paperback fiction, reading broadly in contemporary fiction with the occasional diversion into classics.

For September, the group returns with not one, but two books, exploring Leibniz's philosophy from multiple angles! Written with a tip of the hat to the works of Thomas Bernhard and Franz Kafka, The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs stands as a towering comic fable: a story about the nature of perception, and the ways the heart of a loved one can prove as unfathomable as the stars.

And Theo Cuffe's marvelous and vibrant translation of Voltaire's satirical masterpiece illuminates the hilarious adventures of the titular naïve Candide, who doggedly believes that “all is for the best” even when faced with injustice, suffering, and despair. Controversial and entertaining, Candide is a book that is vitally relevant today in our world pervaded by—as Candide would say—“the mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well.”