Book Club for Writers Discussion

Join us for our next Book Club for Writers discussion on Thursday, April 24 at 7:00 PM, when we will discuss stories by Angela Carter and Kelly Link, authors who are both known for incorporating elements of fairy tales in their fiction.

We will discuss “The Bloody Chamber” by Angela Carter and “Travels with the Snow Queen” by Kelly Link. The discussion will be free and open to the public, and copies of the stories are available from the library in advance.

The British novelist, essayist, and short story writer Angela Carter was known for infusing her work with both magical realism and feminism. The London Times ranked her tenth on its list of “the 50 greatest British writers since 1945,” and though she died of cancer in 1991, her work has continued to be influential and widely discussed. Her collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories was published in 1979 and won the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize; the stories play with the conventions and concerns of traditional fairy tales.

Kelly Link is an American editor, author, and publisher who, like Carter, is also interested in fairy tales and magical realism. “Travels with the Snow Queen” won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and appeared in her 2001 collection Stranger Things Happen, which was named one of the best books of the year by Salon and the Village Voice. With her husband, she runs the literary and science fiction publisher Small Beer Press.

Book Club for Writers is a fiction discussion program that meets four times a year. Discussions are open to all, and focus particularly on questions of craft and technique that will interest writers and aspiring writers. Created by the New Hampshire Writers’ Project, Book Club for Writers is sponsored locally by a fiction writing group that meets weekly at the Haverhill Corner Library.

The next Book Club for Writers discussion will be held on Thursday, July 25 and will feature “Everything That Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor and “Why I Live at the P.O.” by Eudora Welty.

The Sun Also Rises Discussion

Join us Monday, April 22 at 7:00 PM for a discussion of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. This will be the fourth and final discussion in our series “The Roaring Twenties.” Admission is free and open to the public, and copies of the book are available to borrow in advance. 

Published in 1926 and considered by many to be Hemingway’s greatest work, The Sun Also Rises is a novel about American and British expatriates in Paris and Spain. Based on real people and events, the novel tells the story of the doomed love of Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley. Today considered one of the most important and influential of Modernist novels, the book was immediately popular upon publication and has been continually in print since its first appearance.

Living and working in Paris as a correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway had attended the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain where he had become fascinated with bullfighting. His experiences in Paris and Pamplona became the basis for The Sun Also Rises. Though the novel quoted Gertrude Stein’s observation that his was a “lost generation,” Hemingway rejected this notion, feeling that his characters, while “battered” by their experiences in World War I, were not lost.

The Sun Also Rises is also famous as one of the best examples of Hemingway’s spare style, his elimination of sentimentalism, and his “iceberg theory” of writing in which much of the story occurs beneath the surface of the narrative.