Queer Book Club | Busboys and Poets Book Club
Date and Time
Sep 30, 2023 6:00 pm
Location
Takoma
235 Carroll St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20012
Sep 30, 2023 6:00 pm
Takoma
Every last weekend of the month we host Queer Book Club led by Nathan, the Takoma Bookstore Supervisor, at Busboys and Poets Takoma. There we'll gather to discuss a specific book by a queer author or about a queer subject matter. This book club is for anyone who identifies as LGBTQIA+ and wants to talk about queer books; you can also attend as an ally or if you're questioning! Show up for good food, good books, and good friends - plus, when you show up you get 15% off your bookstore purchase for that day!
For September, in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month 2023, read stories that swing from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment in Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.
You can pick it up at the Busboys and Poets Takoma bookstore for 15% off list price or wherever books are sold, including through our Bookshop.org page. It’s also available in audiobook form from Libro.fm.
Our focus of conversation this month will be on Queerness and Horror (in preparation for Halloween!) so feel free to join us to discuss how you see queer identities intersecting with horror, even if you haven’t read the book!
Her Body and Other Parties - In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella 'Especially Heinous,' Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naèively assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgèangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.
Nathan (they/them) is the Bookstore Supervisor at Busboys Takoma, and is thrilled to be moving and expanding their long-running Ace and Aro Book Club over to Busboys. They are an event organizer with Aces and Aros of the Mid-atlantic, which is cosponsoring this club. They are a life-long resident of Washington, DC and are most passionate about reading science fiction, horror, fantasy, queer theory, and queer romance - but this book club will not be limited by their tastes!
