Literary Feasts
Imagine an eclectic mix of intelligent, inquisitive people – like you - coming together for stimulating conversation about a recently published book – selected with Wichita Public Radio listeners in mind. KMUW presents Literary Feasts…where guests enjoy a buffet of delicious seasonal food, savor a glass of wine chosen to compliment the repast and then settle in for an hour of lively book discussion.
The venue is Watermark Books and Café, located in Lincoln Heights Center at Douglas and Oliver. KMUW’s Literary Feasts gatherings are the second Friday of each month from 7 to 9 pm. Tickets are $25 and may be purchased at Watermark, along with your book for a 20 percent discount. Call Watermark at 682-1181. It has become the tastiest ticket in town and there is a limit of only 30 tickets, so don’t wait!
September 10 - Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
From Publishers Weekly: Shteyngart presents another profane and dizzying satire, a dystopic vision of the future as convincing—and, in its way, as frightening—as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s also a pointedly old-fashioned May-December love story, complete with references to Chekhov and Tolstoy. Mired in protracted adolescence, middle-aged Lenny Abramov is obsessed with living forever (he works for an Indefinite Life Extension company), his books (an anachronism of this indeterminate future), and Eunice Park, a 20-something Korean-American. Eunice, though reluctant and often cruel, finds in Lenny a loving but needy fellow soul and a refuge from her overbearing immigrant parents. Narrating in alternate chapters—Lenny through old-fashioned diary entries, Eunice through her online correspondence—the pair reveal a funhouse-mirror version of contemporary America: terminally indebted to China, controlled by the singular Bipartisan Party (Big Brother as played by a cartoon otter in a cowboy hat), and consumed by the superficial. Shteyngart’s earnestly struggling characters—along with a flurry of running gags—keep the nightmare tour of tomorrow grounded. A rich commentary on the obsessions and catastrophes of the information age and a heartbreaker worthy of its title, this is Shteyngart’s best yet.
October 8 - The Gendarme by Mark T. Mustian
From Amazon.com: Emmett Conn is an old man, near the end of his life. A World War I veteran, he’s been affected by memory loss since being injured during the war. To those around him, he’s simply a confused man, fading in and out of senility. But what they don’t know is that Emmett has been beset by memories, of events he and others have denied or purposely forgotten. In Emmett’s dreams he’s a gendarme, escorting Armenians from Turkey. A young woman among them, Araxie, captivates and enthralls him. But then the trek ends, the war separates them. He is injured. Seven decades later, as his grasp on the boundaries between past and present begins to break down, Emmett sets out on a final journey, to find Araxie and beg her forgiveness. Mark Mustian has written a remarkable novel about the power of memory-and the ability of people, individually and collectively, to forget. Depicting how love can transcend nationalities, politics, and religion, how racism creates divisions where none truly exist, and how the human spirit fights to survive even in the face of hopelessness, The Gendarme is a transcendent novel.
