Elliott Bay Book Group
Join this lively monthly discussion group that focuses on discovering the wealth of published fiction and non-fiction. Readers are invited to join as a regular monthly participant or to drop in for any of the featured titles as time and interest allow. The Elliott Bay Book Group is currently meeting virtually and if you are interested in joining, please send an email to BOOKCLUB@ELLIOTTBAYBOOK.COM.
May 2021
Go Tell it on the Mountain
In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."
“With vivid imagery, with lavish attention to details ... [a] feverish story.” —The New York Times
Meeting virtually on Tuesday, May 4th at 6:30 PM
June 2021
A Silent Fury
On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compa a de Santa Gertrudis--the largest employer in the region, and a subsidiary of the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company--may have committed murder.
The alert was first raised at six in the morning: a fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a brief evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that "no more than ten" men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all ten were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death toll was not ten, but eighty-seven. And there were seven survivors.
A century later, acclaimed novelist Yuri Herrera has reconstructed a workers' tragedy at once globally resonant and deeply personal: Pachuca is his hometown. His work is an act of restitution for the victims and their families, bringing his full force of evocation to bear on the injustices that suffocated this horrific event into silence.
Meeting virtually on Tuesday, June 1st at 6:30 PM
