Broken Dishes Book Club with Swati

Have you ever watched a woman blow up her life, and thought, good for her? This is a book club for those who seek to disrupt notions of domestic bliss - we want batshit plots, women who don't settle, and eleventh hour plot twists. We want all this packaged into a very literary 300 pages or less. This book club will explore should-be and to-be classics by literary hotties of centuries past. Leave the dirty dishes at home and come indulge with us.

This month we'll discuss Yuko Tsushima's collection of short stories, examining the lives of single women coping with motherhood, passion, jealousy, and the tug-of-war between responsibility and entrapment, The Shooting Gallery, translated by Geraldine Harcourt.

[Tsushima’s heroines share a] hopeless, level gaze which sees everything, the ability (in spite of having seen everything) to go ahead, eyes on the road–it takes a very special and very personal talent to so convincingly display this….[And] here Tsushima has finally found something like perfection in this imperfect world–Geraldine Harcourt’s translations. After the first page, one completely forgets that it is, indeed, a translation one is reading.
— Donald Richie - The Japan Times

As potent and heady as a dry martini….Tsushima is an archaeologist of the female psyche, reconstructing the burnt nerve endings underneath unprepossessing female exteriors.
— The Village Voice

The eight powerful stories of The Shooting Gallery examine the lives of single women coping with motherhood, passion, jealousy, and the tug-of-war between responsibility and entrapment.

An unwed mother arranges for her children to meet their father, who is a stranger to them. A woman confronts the “other woman” in her lover’s life. A young single mother on an outing to the seaside comes face to face with how much she resents her own children. Another woman tries desperately to hold on to a private life despite her controlling male relatives.

Reserve your place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the book club meeting on any product in store.