May 2008

ELLIOTT BAY BOOK GROUP
Tuesday, May 6th at 6:30 p.m.
(first Tuesday of each month)

Each month, the Elliott Bay Book Club reads and discusses the best in contemporary fiction with the occasional classic thrown in for good measure. This month we examine Gaétan Soucy's The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches. French Canadian writer Gaétan Soucy's novel was a finalist for France's prestigious Prix Renaudot. It is the story of two siblings that grow up isolated from the outside world. Le Monde said of the book that, "Soucy is a master of suspense...while the tale becomes more explicit as it progresses, it also becomes more bewitching, more mysteriously pulsating." and the Toronto Star wrote, "Takes a short time to read and a long time to forget."

GLOBAL ISSUES & ETHICS BOOK GROUP
Tuesday, May 13th at 6:30 p.m.
(second Tuesday of each month)

Our Global Issues & Ethics Book Group is devoted to discussing books that cover the most relevant topics of our everyday lives. William T. Vollmann visited towns and cities around the world and asked one basic question: "Why are you poor?" His book, Poor People explores the fundamental questions of poverty by engaging the very people who are abjectly poor. The San Francisco Chronicle says of Vollmann and his book, "Few writing today can handle writing about the underclasses of the world like Vollmann...a writer who writes not only beautifully but also responsibly and morally." The Seattle Times said, "Vollmann has written a book of enormous power—one that honors the magnitude of each story it records and allows them to say in their own words why life has laid them so low."

SPECULATIONS - SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY BOOK GROUP
Tuesday, May 20th at 6:30 p.m.
(third Tuesday of each month)

As the literature of ideas and imagination, Science Fiction and Fantasy simply demands discussion. Our choice this month is The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. A hilarious and surreal mystery set in an alternative Great Britain, 1985, where the Crimean War has dragged on for over 130 years, England's Third Most Wanted criminal is abducting characters from some of the country's most cherished literature, and Special Operations Network has (luckily!) a Literary Division. Join us to discuss this clever and unique mystery.

STAGES - DRAMA BOOK GROUP
Tuesday, May 27th at 6:30 p.m.
(fourth Tuesday of each month)

Elliott Bay's Drama Book Group, Stages, meets once a month to read, enjoy and discuss great plays and dramatic works, contemporary and classic, from the U.S. and around the world. In The Overwhelming, J.T. Rogers has written a play that is both a brilliantly crafted piece of writing and a tense, suspenseful exploration of one of the great human tragedies of our time. A middle-aged academic leaps at the chance to go to Rwanda to write about an old college classmate, who has in the intervening years has specialized in treating Tutsi children stricken by AIDS. But when he arrives with his family in Kigali in the fall of 1994, they slowly, then urgently, become enmeshed in the tension and terror, the professional risks and personal betrayals, that ultimately mark the start of a genocidal war—a horror that they can sense but cannot comprehend or control.