April 1st7pm
Join the New Directions crew on an odyssey, no caper, called: THE LIFE OF THE MIND (to borrow a beloved expression by Helen DeWitt). We'll read staff favorites and New Directions staples with an emphasis on writerly genius and comic relief; and for each doorstopping magnum opus there's a jewel of a book so slight we could barely get a spine on it. Do you have to have read HERSCHT 07768 to understand HERSCHT 07769? If you know you know. If you don't know, come and find out... there will be wine....
This month we'll discuss Keith Ridgway's thrilling and unsparing, slippery and shockingly good novel, A Shock.
Idiosyncratic and fascinating.— Zadie Smith
At first it seems we might be in a book of interlinked stories, but discovering you aren’t quite where you thought you might be is part of the deliberate disorientation of A Shock. It soon becomes clear that the sections in the novel don’t interlink so much as echo and rhyme. The observation is acute, the dialogue sparkles, the movement between interiority and surveillance is deft. It is a novel of in-between places that keeps the reader off-balance to surprising, intelligent and sometimes eerie effect.— Kamila Shamsie, (Citation for the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize shortlist)
Formed as a rondel of interlocking stories with a clutch of more or less loosely connected repeating characters, it’s at once deracinated yet potent with place, druggy yet frighteningly shot through with reality. His people appear, disappear, and reappear. They’re on the fringes of London, clinging to sanity or solvency or a story by their fingernails, consumed by emotions and anxieties in fuzzily understood situations. A deft, high-wire act, full of imprecise yet sharp dialog as well as witchy sleights of hand reminiscent of Muriel Spark, A Shock delivers a knockout punch of an ending.
Perhaps Ridgway’s most breathtaking quality is his scintillating stealthiness: you can never quite put your finger on how he casts his spell—he delivers the shock of a master jewel thief (already far-off and scot-free) stealing your watch: when at some point you look down at your wrist, all you see is that in more than one way you don’t know what time it is…
Reserve your place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the book club meeting on any product in store.