OBLONG BOOKS & MUSIC ANNOUNCES A NEW COMMUNITY BOOK GROUP SERIES WITH A SOCIAL JUSTICE FOCUS.

In February the group will focus on racial inequality and will be reading KINDRED by Octavia Butler, together with KINDRED: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Damian Duffy & John Jennings. Reading of the Graphic Novel is optional.
http://www.oblongbooks.com/event/social-justice-book-group-kindred

Kindred is the bestselling novel by American science-fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Part time-travel tale and part slave narrative, it was first published in 1979 and is still widely popular. In the book Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Participants are encouraged to also read the graphic novel adaptation in which Duffy and Jennings transform the novel format into a visually stunning work for a new generation of readers.

On Tuesday, March 21 the group will meet with a focus on feminism and will read two books by author and activist Rebecca Solnit. MEN EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME – which Salon.com calls “Feminist, frequently funny, unflinchingly honest and often scathing in its conclusions.” – and HOPE IN THE DARK: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. (Both books are very short!).
http://www.oblongbooks.com/event/social-justice-book-group-rebecca-solnit

In Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit takes on the conversations between men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t. The ultimate problem, she shows in her comic, scathing essay, is female self-doubt and the silencing of women.

“It’s a fraught time to be female in America (or should I say fraught-er), and a newly expanded edition of Rebecca Solnit ’s Men Explain Things to Me is the most clarifying, soothing and socially aware document I’ve read on the topic this year.” says screenwriter, producer and actor Lena Dunham, from the HBO hit series GIRLS.
Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next.
The object of the gatherings is for us to read and learn together in an informal, and non-judgemental atmosphere.

Both meetings will take place at 6:00 p.m. at Oblong’s Rhinebeck store located at 6422 Montgomery Street. The discussion will be facilitated  by Oblong co-owner Suzanna Hermans. Books can be purchased from either Oblong store location or ordered online. Registration is required.

More meetings in the series are also being planned for Oblong’s Millerton store location and will be announced in the next few weeksAbout the Authors:

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER is author of many novels, including Adulthood Rites and The Parable of the Sower. She is the winner of the Nebula Award and twice winner of the Hugo Award. Butler died in 2006.
http://octaviabutler.org/

DAMIAN DUFFY is a cartoonist, scholar, writer, curator, lecturer, teacher, and Glyph Comics Award-winning graphic novelist. He holds a MS and PhD in Library and Information Sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
http://damianduffy.net/

JOHN JENNINGS is Associate Professor of Graphic Design at The University of Buffalo. His research and teaching focus on the analysis, explication, and disruption of African American stereotypes in popular visual media. His research is concerned with the topics of representation and authenticity, visual culture, visual literacy, social justice, and design pedagogy.
http://art.buffalo.edu/faculty-staff/john-jennings/

REBECCA SOLNIT is a writer, historian and activist, and the author of  more than eighteen books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster.
http://rebeccasolnit.net/