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Bixby Knolls Literary Society, Long Beach, CA (2025)

07/11/2024

𝟏𝟗𝟖𝐭𝐡 𝐌𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 - 𝑻𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝑶𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝑬𝒅𝒆𝒏 𝗯𝘆 𝗣𝗮𝘂𝗹 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴

Next Society Meeting:
Wednesday, August 14, 2024, 7:00pm

Dream Come True Tea & Party Room
4350 Atlantic Avenue

Parking is available along Atlantic Avenue.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize • Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction • A New Yorker Best Books of 2023 • An NPR 2023 "Books We Love" Pick • An NPR Top 10 Book of 2023 • One of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2023 • A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2023 and Best Historical Fiction of 2023 • A Chicago Public Library Favorite Book of 2023 • A Fresh Air Top 10 Best Book of 2023 • A Publisher's Weekly Best Fiction of 2023

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers, a novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast.

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland.

04/10/2024

A friendly reminder that our Literary Society meeting is next week on Wednesday, April 17. Check out the resources included in our newsletter if you have not already.

https://mailchi.mp/bixbyknollsinfo/literary-society-april-selection-2589723

10/16/2023

189th Meeting

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

Next Society Meeting:
Wednesday, November 8, 2023, 7:00pm

Dream Come True Tea & Party Room - 4350 Atlantic Avenue
Parking available along Atlantic Avenue

Refreshments will be provided.
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The Night Watchman is a novel by Louise Erdrich first published on March 3, 2020, by HarperCollins. The novel is set in the 1950s. This is Erdrich's sixth standalone novel following Future Home of the Living God. The novel was inspired by the life of Erdrich's grandfather who motivated and inspired other members of the Turtle Mountain Reservation to resist the Indian termination policies of the 1940s-1960s. The Night Watchman is the first novel that Erdrich has written that is set on the Turtle Mountain Reservation In 2021, the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

07/13/2023

186th Meeting
The Storied Life of A.K. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

Next Society Meeting: Wednesday, August 9, 2023, 7:00pm

Dream Come True Tea & Party Room: 4350 Atlantic Avenue
Parking available along Atlantic Avenue
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“The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” is about a middle-aged man who owns a failing independent bookstore on Alice Island off the coast of Massachusetts. Depressed for the past two years following the death of his wife, Fikry is lonesome, angry and a bit of a literary snob.

A.J. Fikry's life is not at all what he expected it to be. His wife has died, his bookstore is experiencing the worst sales in its history, and now his prized possession—a rare collection of Poe poems—has been stolen. Slowly but surely, he is isolating himself from all the people of Alice Island, and even the books in his store have stopped holding pleasure for him. Then a mysterious package appears at the bookstore. It's a small package, though large in weight—an unexpected arrival that gives A.J. the opportunity to make his life over, the ability to see everything anew. It doesn't take long for the locals to notice the change overcoming A.J. As surprising as it is moving, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry is an unforgettable tale of transformation and second chances, an irresistible affirmation of why we read, and why we love.

06/16/2023

185th Meeting - The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Next Society Meeting: Wednesday, July 12, 2023, 7:00pm

Dream Come True Tea & Party Room: 4350 Atlantic Avenue

Parking available along Atlantic Avenue
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NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century is the story of a family of Southern aristocrats on the brink of personal and financial ruin.

The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

The Sound and the Fury is a novel by the American author William Faulkner. It employs several narrative styles, including stream of consciousness. Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner's fourth novel, and was not immediately successful. In 1931, however, when Faulkner's sixth novel, Sanctuary, was published—a sensationalist story, which Faulkner later said was written only for money—The Sound and the Fury also became commercially successful, and Faulkner began to receive critical attention.

05/11/2023

184th Meeting - Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Next Society Meeting: Wednesday, June 14, 2023, 7:00pm

Dream Come True Tea & Party Room 4350 Atlantic Avenue
Parking available along Atlantic Avenue
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Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to Mr. Rochester's marriage from the point-of-view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Antoinette Cosway is Rhys's version of Brontë's "madwoman in the attic". Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion. Antoinette is caught in a patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica. Wide Sargasso Sea explores the power of relationships between men and women and discusses the themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation.

04/20/2023

183rd Meeting - Circe by Madeline Miller

Next Society Meeting:
Wednesday, May 10, 2023, 7:00pm

Dream Come True Tea & Party Room
4350 Atlantic Avenue
Parking available along Atlantic Avenue

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Circe is a 2018 novel by American writer Madeline Miller. Set during the Greek Heroic Age, it is an adaptation of various Greek myths, most notably the Odyssey, as told from the perspective of the witch Circe. The novel explores Circe's origin story and narrates Circe's encounters with mythological figures such as Hermes, the Minotaur, Jason, and Medea, and ultimately her romance with Odysseus and his son, Telemachus.

"A bold and subversive retelling of the goddess's story," this #1 New York Times bestseller is "both epic and intimate in its scope, recasting the most infamous female figure from the Odyssey as a hero in her own right" (Alexandra Alter, The New York Times).

In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child -- not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power -- the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.

03/15/2023

182nd Meeting

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

Next Society Meeting:
Wednesday, April 19, 2023, 7:00pm

A Dream Come True Tea & Party Room
4350 Atlantic Avenue

Parking available along Atlantic Avenue

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In a poor, remote section of southern Mexico, the paramilitary group, the Red Shirts have taken control. God has been outlawed, and the priests have been systematically hunted down and killed. Now, the last priest is on the run. Too human for heroism, too humble for martyrdom, the nameless little worldly “whiskey priest” is nevertheless impelled toward his squalid Calvary as much by his own compassion for humanity as by the efforts of his pursuers.

In his introduction, John Updike calls The Power and the Glory, “Graham Greene’s masterpiece…. The energy and grandeur of his finest novel derive from the will toward compassion, an ideal communism even more Christian than Communist.”

02/14/2023

Photos from our 15th year Literary Society meeting anniversary.

02/09/2023

181st Meeting - The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

Next Society Meeting:
Wednesday, March 8, 2023, 7:00pm

A Dream Come True Tea & Party Room
4350 Atlantic Avenue

Parking available along Atlantic Avenue
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The Sea, the Sea is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1978, it was her nineteenth novel. It won the 1978 Booker Prize.

The Sea, the Sea is a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a self-satisfied playwright and director as he begins to write his memoirs. Murdoch's novel exposes the motivations that drive her characters – the vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises they present to the world.

This novel poses as the memoir of Charles Arrowby, a 60-something retired theater director, who alternates writing about his somewhat sordid past and his new retirement digs on the coast of England: an old, damp, and possibly haunted house on a cliff overlooking the sea.

01/12/2023

180th Meeting: 15th Anniversary Special Session
Led by Gordon Cohn

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
The preferred edition is the Penguin Classics paperback edition
translated by Peter Carson.

Next Society Meeting:
Wednesday, February 8, 2023, 7:00pm

At Dream Come True Tea & Party Room
4350 Atlantic Avenue
Parking available along Atlantic Ave.

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The 200-page novel deals with two young college-age friends in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century, Arkady and Bazarov, their relationship with their elders and with women who have attracted their attention. Generational differences are one of a number of issues that seem relevant today and worthy of discussion and debate.

You are urged to come fresh to the book rather than read a plot summary beforehand.

"My favorite novel is Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, a 200-page ravishing knockout of a book that explains just about everything you need to know about families, love, heartache, religion, duels and the institution of serfdom in 19th-century Russia. . . . In short, it's a Russian masterpiece, one written so beautifully and with such economy, that when you finish reading it you feel a little shaken and a little stirred. A vodka martini on the front porch might be in order.”
Gary Shteyngart, Soviet-born American fiction writer whose fiction has been among NY Times Notable Books.

01/05/2023

Hi everyone,

Friendly reminder that our Literary Society meeting is next week. Check out some articles and videos below in the meantime.

Resources: https://mailchi.mp/bixbyknollsinfo/literary-society-april-selection-2587243

179th Meeting - Wednesday January 11, 2023, 7:00pm at Dream Come True Tea & Party Room (4350 Atlantic Avenue)

12/15/2022

January Book Selection - The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

179th Meeting

Next Society Meeting:
Wednesday, January 11, 2023, 7:00pm
A Dream Come True Tea & Party Room
4350 Atlantic Avenue
Parking available along Atlantic Avenue

12/08/2022

December Book Selection - 178th Meeting

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Next Society Meeting: Wednesday, December 14, 2022, 7:00pm

Location: Dream Come True Tea & Party Room
4350 Atlantic Avenue
Parking available along Atlantic Avenue

View book resources here: https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=26a660c2b00d102dc85e79076&id=1ec56ebab8

10/26/2022

November Book Selection

Next Society Meeting:
Wednesday, November 9, 2022, 7:00pm

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

A Dream Come True Tea & Party Room
4350 Atlantic Avenue
Parking available along Atlantic Avenue

Bixby Knolls Literary Society