​​Upcoming Books:
July 15 @ Kathy
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek  - Kim Michele Richardson
September 16 @Maitand
Middlemarch - George Eliot
October 20 @Carol
The Mysteries - Marisa Silver
Dec 2 @Toni
Montana 1948 by Larry Watson

Author Bio: 

Marisa Silver is the author of The Mysteries (2021), Little Nothing (2016), a New York Times Editor's Choice, and winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction, Mary Coin (2013), a New York Times Bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller's Award, and an NPR and BBC Best Book of the Year, Alone With You (2010), The God of War (2008), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, No Direction Home (2005), and Babe in Paradise (2001), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Her short fiction has won the O. Henry Prize and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic.com and many other publications, and has been included in The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies.
In 2018, Silver was awarded the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. In 2017, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Creative Arts. She teaches at The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Source: Marisa Silver

 Book Stack - on the blog

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Read BExtraordinaire Blog for book recommendations, reviews, and other book club updates. ​​
is reading The Mysteries  by Marissa Silver for October Book Club.​

Bestselling author Marisa Silver's novel, The Mysteries illustrates how the fine balance of everyday life can so easily be shattered in an instance.
The novel takes place in Saint Louis in 1973, as the country is in a recession and the Vietnam war was ending. It centers around two families and their two young 7 year old girls,  Miggy and Ellen. The families are from different backgrounds and neighborhoods, one living in Maplewood and the other in Webster Groves. The two girls meet at a dance school owned by Miggy's mother.  Miggy is a force to be reckoned with and Ellen is meek and mild. Miggy knows when Ellen comes over to play Miggy can get away with just about anything because she has a guest.
​This powerful novel explores childhood, family dynamics, marriage, and grief. 
Marisa Silver with Charlie Brennan- The Mysteries
Left Bank Books
May 11, 2021

Author Quotes: 
“What I decided early on was that it couldn’t just be Miggy’s story because she’s not in charge of her story. I wanted to show the lives that were in charge of Miggy. So, I chose a kind of narrative stance—I love that we’re talking called geeky, writing stuff, my favorite—that was very flexible, that could survey the scene in an omniscient manner, but also then telescope right down to the heart of a character.”
― Marisa Silver (Finally) Nailing Down her Novel's Point of View. In conversation with Mitzi Rapkin on First Draft podcast
Book Review:
 “The central event of the story — I won’t mention the details; no spoiler alert required — happened to my father when he was a child. He was in a car with his mother and a friend of his, and he witnessed a traumatic event. It was a story he told me, but never explained or analyzed. I always wondered how that affected him and my grandmother, and what the repercussions were.
That was the springboard. Then came the voice of Miggy, my protagonist. She was suddenly there, this complicated, vexing, richly feeling seven-year-old. When she appeared I thought, holy moly, how do you get inside the consciousness of a seven-year-old? How do I find the voice that expresses her in an intimate way, but in language she’d be able to use to describe her own interiority?"
The Los Angeles Review of Books
The Unruliness of Life: A Conversation with Marisa Silver
May 13, 2021
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