Welcome to Annotated, a Bookends & Beginnings book club! We focus on genre-bending, boundary-pushing fiction in bite-sized packages. All selected titles are written by women or gender-queer authors and are read in translation.
Please note that this month's title contains content relating to suicide.
For Thursday, May 22, we'll be reading Last Words from Montmartre by Qiu Miaojin, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich. Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women. Veering between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu’s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author’s own suicide note.
All book club attendees are required to purchase tickets through Eventbrite. You may buy the book or select the option to buy a certificate of the same value, to be redeemed on any in-store purchases on or before the event date. Certificates can be used on all in-store items except at the MiniBar.
About Annotated: If your shelves are studded with NYRB and Fitzcarraldo titles, this is the book club for you. Rather than looking for the next big thing, we're more interested in what's too often overlooked: underrepresented voices, sleeper classics, and the books that get under your skin. Form can be fluid, and some Annotated selections may lean more towards poetry, memoir, or narrative non-fiction, but the majority will be fiction. Group members are always encouraged to suggest titles! We believe that a good education is an expansive one, and as such, we commit to choosing books by writers from different regions, literary traditions, and backgrounds.
Annotated Book Club meetings are led by Molly, the Events and Marketing Coordinator at Bookends & Beginnings.
