Hey Broken Pencil members! We’ve got lots of awesome stuff in store for you loyal subscribers in 2017.
That’s why we’re stoked to be launching The Broken Pencil Book Club! And this ain’t your auntie’s book club (though I know that hers can get a little out of hand sometimes too, the ol’ gossip). This is a book club for the 21st century!
Here’s how it works:
1. We put up a poll of three books from one of our favourite small press publishers (see below!). For our first stab at this, we’ve partnered with our pals at the great independent press BookThug, who have worked with us to come up with a list of three books worth discussing and offered a discount code for BP Members to get their hands on the winning book.
2. You have two weeks to vote on the book you’d like to read most. Note, when you fill out the form below, the blank field is for you to put in your email, so we can start a mailing list of book club participants and let you know when everything is happening!
3. After everyone votes and the book is chosen, you’ll get a discount code from BookThug and about a month to read the book.
4. In April, we’ll schedule an online chatroom session where BP members, staff, and the author get to discuss the book, writing and publishing and whatever else comes up. If all goes well we’ll try to do a have book club meeting 4 x a year. Sound good?
5. Any problems voting or any questions, email assistant editor Jonathan!
ps – The BP Book Club is for Broken Pencil members only. You can become a member right now by subscribing to BP here.
Your 3 options this time around are below!
Your options are….
[powr-poll id=206e1d81_1486575076422]
Paul is not always the same Paul, but could very well be a similar Paul, another Paul in a long line of Pauls. Paul runs through forests, drinks in student housing, flirts with girls, at times is a girl, loves men, makes friends, jumps from buildings, hurts people, gets hurt, climbs up towards the sky, waits for a sunrise, and all those human things.
Pauls, the debut short-story collection by the exciting young writer Jess Taylor, is about people: the things that remain unseen to them; how they cope with their unforgettable pasts; the different roles they take in each other’s lives; how they hurt each other; how they try to heal each other; the things they want to learn; and the things they’ll never discover. At the same time, Pauls is a portrayal of the world as these people see it—they all exist in a universe that is strange and indifferent to those within it. Coincidences, relationships, conversations, and friendships all pose more questions than answers.
Who hasn’t, at one time or another, considered killing a billionaire?
Rich and Poor is a novel of a man who washes dishes for a living and decides to kill a billionaire as a political act. It is literature as political theory and theory as pure literary pleasure—a spiralling, fast-paced parable of joyous, overly self-aware, mischievous class warfare.
As his plan proceeds and becomes more feasible, the story cuts back and forth between his and the billionaire’s perspectives, gradually revealing how easily the poisons of ambition, wealth and revolutionary violence can become entangled. A fable of not knowing how to change the world and perhaps learning how to do so in the process.
Double Teenage tells the story of Celine and Julie, two girls coming of age in the 1990s in a desert town close to the US–Mexico border. Starting from their shared love of theater, the girls move into a wider world that shimmers with intellectual and artistic possibility, but at the same time, is dense with threat.
This unrelenting novel shines a spotlight on paradoxes of Western culture. It asks impossible questions about the media’s obsession with sexual violence as it twins with a social unwillingness to look at real pain. It asks what it feels like to be a girl, simultaneously a being and a thing, feeling in a marketplace. Wherever they are—whether in a dance club in El Paso or an art lecture in Vancouver—these characters brush against maddening contradiction and concealed brutality.
This is a portrait of the recent past, seen through the cloudy lens of now.
So, have your vote in the first ever BP Book Club selection! Voting will be live until March 14. Once it’s clear which book we’re going with, you’ll get more information about a discount code to buy the book (of course the library is also an option) and the timing of the first online gathering.
Note — all current Broken Pencil subscribers (including those who subscribe to the digital edition) are Broken Pencil members. If you are not currently a subscriber and want to be part of the book club, there’s still time! Subscribe now and then come back and take the survey and get ready to book club!