If you’re looking for a way to connect with other literature lovers and find new sustenance in your bookshelves—like we are—we invite you to join our virtual book club, Restless Reads. Together with the Jones Library, we’re looking to great books from other times for comfort, insight, and community.
Each month, we’ll pick a Restless Classic to read and chat about online in two discussion sessions led by Ilan Stavans, our publisher and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. Our May book is Passing by Nella Larsen; check back here for next month’s pick.
We polled you and you picked Nella Larsen’s Passing as our May book club pick, to which we say: yes, yes, yes. Charged with psychological depth and homoerotic longing, it’s an overlooked masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, by a black woman whose heyday as a writer was bright but far too brief. Learn more about our May pick here.
Here’s how to join us:
Get your copy of Passing. Our Restless Classics edition is here on Bookshop, which is a great place to buy books these days—they’re a new platform that gives over 75% of its profit margin straight to independent bookstores.
Join us for two virtual book club meetings via Zoom, led by our publisher and literature scholar Ilan Stavans:
Thursday, May 14 at 8 pm EDT
What to read: through chapter 1 of Part Two: Re-encounter (pp. 1–71 in our edition)
Register here.
Thursday, May 21 at 8 pm EDT
What to read: chapter 2 of part 2 through Part 3: The Finale (pp. 73–141 in our edition)
Register here.
Our April pick was Frankenstein, a story that’s familiar and yet endlessly strange, with an origin story practically ripped from the headlines of 2020: overwhelming natural phenomena, global disaster, social distancing. Listen to recordings of our discussions here.
About the Host
© Kevin Gutting
Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast."