Kudos Reading Group

📖 We'll be meeting again next week to discuss Catherine Lacey's novel "Pew"!

⛪️ In a small unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives to a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless, racially ambiguous, and refuses to speak. One family takes the strange visitor in and nicknames them Pew.

🏘 As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origins. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance.

📆 Wednesday, 29 November
🕛 16:00
📍in-person: room TBA (FLLS Building, Pitar Moș)
💻 online: link TBA on Bookclubs

Don't forget to join Bookclubs (link in bio) for all the necessary details (Zoom link & books in e-format)!

See you there!

✒️ Kudos is a student-led reading group organised under the auspices of the British Cultural Studies - University of Bucharest and AmericanStudies Unibuc programmes at the University of Bucharest.

📚 Kudos will be meeting again on the 27th of February (12:00) to discuss our February Book of the Month, 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑩𝒐𝒐𝒌 𝒐𝒇 𝑴𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 by Violaine Huisman.

📖 A gorgeous, critically acclaimed debut novel about a young woman’s coming of age with a dazzling yet damaged mother who lived and loved in extremes. A prizewinning tour de force when it was published in France, Violaine Huisman’s remarkable debut novel is about a daughter’s inextinguishable love for her magnetic, mercurial mother. Beautiful and charismatic, Catherine, a.k.a. “Maman,” smokes too much, drives too fast, laughs too hard, and loves too extravagantly. But when Maman is hospitalized after a third divorce and a breakdown, everything changes. Even as Violaine and her sister long for their mother’s return, once she’s back Maman’s violent mood swings and flagrant disregard for personal boundaries soon turn their home into an emotional landmine. As the story of Catherine’s own traumatic childhood and adolescence unfolds, the pieces come together to form an indelible portrait of a mother as irresistible as she is impossible, as triumphant as she is transgressive.

✒️ Violaine Huisman was born in Paris in 1979 and has lived and worked in New York for twenty years, where she ran the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s literary series and also organized multidisciplinary arts festivals across the city. Originally published by Gallimard under the title ‘Fugitive parce que reine,’ her debut novel The Book of Mother was awarded multiple literary prizes including the Prix Françoise Sagan and the Prix Marie Claire.

💻 Join Kudos Reading Group via the link in our bio! (where you can also find the Zoom link, the book in electronic format, & a place to chat about all things bookish)

☂️ We are meeting soon to discuss Enriquez's collection of short stories, "The Dangers of Smoking in Bed"!

🕓 January 5th, 16:00, on Zoom!

💻 Join Kudos Reading Group using the Bookclubs link in our bio (where you can also find the Zoom link, the book in electronic format, & a place to chat about all things bookish)
❕ We provide professional practice certificates (5-hour-worth) for all students who join us & participate in the discussion.