October 11th7pm
RSVP Required - see below
Are you too hardcore for the current state of American letters? The tragic truth is that most new books seem afraid to shock, experiment, offend, get weird. Is there still a place in this world for the freaky girlies? The answer is yes. Morgan and Enzo are two booksellers at McNally Jackson Seaport who delight in the decadent, the debased, and the degenerate. Now, they open their private reading circle to the last libertines in New York. This won’t be a cozy time by the fireplace. We don’t talk to Reese Witherspoon. We don’t know Oprah. This is Batshit Book Club, and baby, there will be no seatbelts.
This month we'll discuss Heather Lewis' classic queer text of trauma, Notice.
"This book gutted me and played me and broke my heart, invented a game of truth or dare that was also a round of Russian roulette, ran a race with no warning shot."
—Emmeline Clein, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Lewis’s work is full of horror … bursting with equal parts spark and smoke. Her characters are always active, always enduring and surviving the greatest atrocities by lending the wheel to the evil and unwieldy, stealing it back before the great crash."
—T Kira Madden, The Rumpus
The reason it’s never just once is the same reason money’s only a part of it. Most anyone can take or leave that, though they don’t think they can. The cover story of all time, that’s what money is. The excuse of excuses no one will question because they so much need to use it themselves.
Published by Doubleday in 1994, Heather Lewis’s chilling debut novel took place on the northeastern equestrian show-riding circuit, to which Lewis herself belonged in her teens. Expelled from boarding school, its fifteen-year-old narrator moves numbly through a world of motel rooms, heroin, dyke love, and doped horses. Kirkus Reviews found it “brutal, sensual, honest, seductive … a powerful debut,” while the New York Times found the book “grating and troublesome … it’s difficult to imagine a more passive specimen.”
Almost immediately, Lewis began writing Notice, a novel that moves even further into dark territory. The teenaged narrator Nina begins turning tricks in the parking lot of the train station near the Westchester County home of her absent parents. She soon falls into a sadomasochistic relationship with a couple. Arrested, she’s saved by a counselor and admitted to a psychiatric facility. But these soft forms of control turn out to be even worse. Writing in the register of an emotional fugue state, Notice’s helpless but all-knowing narrator is as smooth and sharp as a knife.
Rejected by every publisher who read it during Lewis’s life, Notice was eventually published by Serpent’s Tail in 2004, two years after her death. The book, long out of print, emerged as a classic queer text of trauma, written by one of the most talented novelists of her generation.
Reserve your place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the book club meeting on any product in store.