August Book Club title...

Mark your calendars for the next IFPL Book Club, Chapter 2 meeting on August 26 @ 7pm on the 3rd Floor

August 26 @ 7pm

Julie Otsuka’s long-awaited follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought from Japan to San Francisco as “picture brides” nearly a century ago.

In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the picture brides’ extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.

Do you know Zelda?

Zelda Fitzgerald was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1900 and was an American novelist and wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.  She was an icon of the 1920s, and was dubbed "the first American Flapper" by her husband. 

Her writings include:
Save Me the Waltz
The Collective Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald

But recently, three books have been written about her and her life:
Z: a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Fowler... a tale inspired by the marriage of F.Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald follows their union in defiance of her father's opposition and her scandalous transformation into a Jazz Age celebrity in the literary party scenes of New York, Paris and the French Rivera

Call Me Zelda by Erika Robuck... Fighting the forge an identity independent of her famous husband, Zelda Fitzgerald, committed to a Baltimore psychiatric hospital in 1932, finds a friend in a nurse Anne Howard, who, drawn into the Fitzgeralds' tumultuous lives, questions who the true genius is.

Beautiful Fools by R.Clifton Spargo... A meticulously detailed story inspired by the passionate but dysfunctional relationship between F. Scott Fitzgerald

While those are fictional accounts based on actual events, here are some biographies:
Zelda by Nancy Milford
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American woman's life by Linda Wagner-Martin
Zelda Fitzgerald: Her voice in paradise by Sally Cline
and then the letters in Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The love letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

And if you're interested in more fiction-based-on-truth from this time period, try:
The Paris Wife by Paula McClain
The Aviator's Wife by Melanie Benjamin
Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
Hemingway's Girl by Erika Robuck
The Age of Desire by Jennie Fields 
The Women by T.C. Boyle 

see you in the library!