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Catapult Book Club

**Due to the much longer than anticipated city-mandated sidewalk replacement project happening on our block of Juniper Street this week, we unfortunately have had to postpone the Catapult Book Club meeting until Thursday, October 18th at 7pm. We will (still) be discussing the September 2018 selection, Improvement by Joan Silber.

Club selections will be paperback fiction and relatively current. Each selection will be offered at a 20% discount for the month leading up to the meeting - Improvement will be 20% off both in-store and online from now until October 18.

Joan Silber's eighth work of fiction, Improvement, was the 2018 winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction as well as the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Silber has long been one of those authors who is a critic's favorite - a writer's writer - without having the big commercial success she seems to deserve. Improvement feels to us like it could be her real breakout novel - at age 72! What begins as a seemingly straightforward narrative - Reyna is living in New York, raising a young son, her boyfriend is in prison, he gets out of jail and into more trouble - leaps into something altogether different and wonderful as the story's narration & perspective switches to that of another minor character. And then another. And another. Before rounding back to Reyna again. Silber has created a circular storyline of essentially linked short stories centered around one woman's life, told through the perspectives of different people both in her close orbit and just on the edges of her periphery. Charles Finch laid it out perfectly in his Washington Post piece: "Now is the moment to appreciate that she (Silber) is here, in our midst: our country's own Alice Munro. Silber's great theme as a writer is the way in which humans are separated from their intentions, by desires, ideas, time. . . Like Grace Paley and Lucia Berlin, she's a master of talking a story past its easiest meaning; like Munro, a master of the compression and dilation of time, what time and nothing else can reveal to people about themselves." 

So please join us on October 18th for another lively discussion! 

 

 

 

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Date: 10/18/2018
Time: 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Place:

3010-B Juniper Street
San Diego, CA 92104
United States