A lively and thoughtful exploration of how book clubs change the way we read.

In this engaging and vivacious memoir, college professor Katarzyna Bartoszyńska thinks back on various book clubs she has been a part of. Through brief discussions of a variety of novels, memoirs, and nonfiction works such as Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken with Plums, and Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing in Cuba, she considers how the things she has learned in book club discussions differ from what she tries to teach students in her literature classes. As she muses on the various benefits that we imagine reading offers, she describes the unique knowledge that book clubs can provide.

Bestselling Irish novelist Sally Rooney has emerged as the defining voice of a generation, a cultural phenomenon whose spare, intelligent prose and sharp social insight have reshaped contemporary fiction and sparked a global conversation about intimacy, politics, and the millennial condition.This new collection brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines to offer fresh critical readings of Rooney’s influential novels, alongside adaptable strategies for teaching her work in today’s undergraduate and graduate classrooms. The essays situate Rooney within literary traditions from Romantic poetry to the Bildungsroman and the contemporary campus novel, while engaging with contemporary topics such as gender politics, late capitalism, and media adaptation. Providing accessible yet rigorous frameworks for exploring Rooney’s fiction, this volume affirms her significance not only within contemporary literary studies, but also as a cultural force whose work reaffirms the relevance of the humanities in the twenty-first-century classroom.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.