Join Lemuria’s Book Club Registry and we’ll order your book club selections for you and let you know when they’re ready for pick-up!

Book Club Members will receive a membership card and receive a 10% discount on their book club’s reading selections.

We see members of Lemuria’s Book Club Registry as part of a reading community. Members will also have opportunities for exclusive sneak peeks at new releases and special author events.

To join have your book club leader fill out an application or stop by and talk to one of our booksellers.

Book Club Registry Application

Are you looking to join a book club? Lemuria hosts two book clubs that are open to our community.

The Lost Book Club of Atlantis

(open to the public)

The Lost Book Club of Atlantis began in 2006 and is facilitated by a Lemuria bookseller. Atlantis reads contemporary and modern fiction along with an occasional nonfiction selection chosen by a Lemuria bookseller.

This book club meets the first Thursday of every month at Noon in Lemuria’s Dot Com Building across the parking lot from Banner Hall. Feel free to bring your lunch. If you are interested in joining, stop by the bookstore and say hello to Lisa or e-mail her at lisa@lemuriabooks.com to be added to the e-mail list. Click here for more details and to see the reading list.

“A good book should leave you slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.” -William Styron

The Cereus Readers Book Club

(open to the public)

The Cereus Readers Book Club was created in honor of Jackson writer Eudora Welty and her friends who gathered for the annual blooming of the night-blooming cereus flower and called themselves “The Night-Blooming Cereus Club.” In this same spirit of friendship and fellowship, this new book club is launched. The goal of the Cereus Readers is to introduce readers to the writing of Eudora Welty–her short stories, essays, and novels–and then to read books and authors she enjoyed herself or were influenced by her.

All meetings will held at the dot.com building adjacent to Banner Hall from 12-1 p.m. Feel free to bring your lunch. If you are interested in joining, stop by the bookstore and say hello to Lisa or e-mail her at lisa@lemuriabooks.com to be added to the e-mail list. Click here to see the reading list.

“I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them–with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.” -Eudora Welty

Would you like to start your own book club?

Here are some points to consider:

Would you like members by invitation only or is the book club open to the public?

How big should the reading group be? Usually 6-12 members is a good number, ensuring that the book club does not fall apart if a few do not show up.

How will you choose the books? Will the books be chosen by a different member each time? Or will a leader choose the books?

Will there be a certain theme? Mystery, Culture, Classics, Contemporary Fiction, Non-Fiction, Science, History, Literature by Women, or Poetry? Also consider keeping the reading selections diverse with titles that your members might not normally read.

Who will lead the discussion? Will the discussion be open or more guided? Do you want your group to stay on topic or just have good time with food & drink & books.

If you have a practice that works well at your book club, please feel free to share it in the comments section below. Every book club is different!

“A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.” -Henry Miller

All of the book quotes were found in Book Love: A Celebration of Writers, Readers, and The Printed & Bound Book edited by James Charlton and Bill Henderson, Pushcart Press, 2011.

“A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.” -Edward P. Morgan

Please indulge this bookseller–It’s not every day that the novel you care so much about wins the most coveted prize in literary fiction.

The amount of reading a Lemuria bookseller does is considerable. This does not even count the amount of time we spend thinking about what to read and sifting through novels that will not matter five years from now.

We also value the hard work of our publisher reps in helping us find some of the best contemporary fiction. Toni Hetzel of Random House put The Orphan Master’s Son in my hand. I was wowed by it and wanted everyone to read it. Because we got to work on this book early, we were able to hold a signing and reading with Adam Johnson in January 2012 and select it as our January First Editions Club pick. We have been so proud to champion Adam Johnson’s work.

USA Today reports that Adam Johnson found out he had won the Pulitzer through a mere text message on his phone. Adam says:

“How can you be prepared for this kind of news? It will mean so much to the readership of the book, and I hope, will get more people to contemplate what’s happening there. North Koreans aren’t allowed to tell their own story. Others have to do it for them.”

Read the full article here.

To close, here’s an essay by Adam Johnson about his travel to North Korea, originally posted in January of 2012 with the author’s permission.

“We are all Korean”

Upon arriving in Pyongyang, one of our first stops was the National Museum of Korean History. It was a large museum with no one in it. To save electricity, which was quite scarce, the museum used motion sensors that turned out the lights when you left a room and flashed them on when you entered the next, so the cavernous journey was taken one flashing glimpse at a time. The first exhibit they showed me was what they claimed was an old skull fragment. It was displayed in a Plexiglas box atop a white pedestal. They informed me that the skull was 4.5 million years old and that it had been found on the shores of the Taedong River in Pyongyang. I was new to such tours, so my brain was filled with dissonance. I asked the museum docent, a middle-aged woman wearing a beautiful choson-ot, if humanity didn’t originate in Africa. “Pyongyang,” she said. I’d taken a course on human origins when I was an undergraduate, and a hazy memory came to me. I said, “So is this a skull fragment from an australopithecine?” She said, “No, Korean.” And I understood that she was a person trained to give a tour and recite prescribed information, not a scholar or curator. In North Korea, whenever evidence is lacking for something, they use a big painting or an elaborate diorama as proof. They had both on hand to explain via arrows and diagrams, how humanity had originated in Pyongyang, with the following Diaspora moving north into Asia and west into the Middle East and Europe. Finally, according to the diorama, humans populated Africa and North America. We had several minders with us, all watching my response to this new information. Finally, our tour guide concluded her lecture by informing me that the World was Korean (by which she meant North Korean) and by informing me that I was actually Korean. A friend of mine, a fellow professor on the tour with me, turned to me and said, “Did you hear, Professor Johnson? You are Korean. Do you feel suddenly Korean?”

I pat my arms and sides. “Yes,” I said, “I feel a little more Korean.”

He said, “You look a little more Korean.”

I rubbed my cheek and chin. “Yes,” I said, “I believe I’m a little more Korean.”

Our tour guide and minders all nodded, with some gravity, at my dawning realization.

So the lesson I learned in the National Museum of Korean History was that there was no irony in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Christian Wiman, poet and long-time editor of “Poetry” Magazine, has released a new book, a series of interwoven essays that explore his relationship with God and faith. A modern-day Confessions.

“There is a distinction to be made between the anxiety of daily existence, which we talk about endlessly, and the anxiety of existence, which we rarely mention at all. The former fritters us into dithering, distracted creatures. The latter attests to–and, if attended to, discloses–our souls….To be truly alive is to feel one’s ultimate existence within one’s daily existence.”

In 2006, Christian Wiman was diagnosed with an incurable cancer. In response, he wrote  “Love Bade Me Welcome,” an essay that explores his floundering faith. My Bright Abyss is the result of a continued exploration of faith and the nature of God:

“When my life broke open seven years ago, I knew very well that I believed in something. Exactly what I believed, however, was considerably less clear. So I set out to answer that question, though I have come to realize that the real question–the real difficulty–is how, not what. How do you answer that burn of being? What might it mean for your life–and for your death–to acknowledge that insistent, persistent ghost?”

Wiman’s unique artistic voice in the spiritual essay is candid and deep, and a welcome addition to the canon.

Lemuria and The Library Lounge have teamed up for some special events this spring. Never heard of The Library Lounge? Imagine a place where there are comfy chairs, lots of beautiful books and a bar. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?

The Library Lounge is kicking off a series of readings featuring local Mississippi writers.

Jack Butler, author of Jujitsu for Christ, will be the first author on Wednesday, April 17th at 6:30. Lemuria will be at the Fairview to provide copies for sale. Jack will be reading from his novel and also signing copies.

The Library Lounge is located in the Fairview Inn in Belhaven on 734 Fairview St, Jackson, MS 39202.

About Jujitsu for Christ

Jack Butler’s “Jujitsu for Christ”–originally published in 1986–follows the adventures of Roger Wing, a white born-again Christian and karate instructor who opens a martial arts studio in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, during the tensest years of the Civil Rights era.

Ambivalent about his religion and his region, Roger Wing befriends the Gandys, an African-American family–parents A.L. and Snower Mae, teenaged son T.J., daughter Eleanor Roosevelt, and youngest son Marcus–who has moved to Jackson from the Delta in hopes of greater opportunity for their children.

As the political heat rises, Roger and the Gandys find their lives intersecting in unexpected ways. Their often-hilarious interactions are told against the backdrop of Mississippi’s racial trauma–Governor Ross Barnett’s “I Love Mississippi” speech at the 1962 Ole Miss-Kentucky football game in Jackson; the riots at the University of Mississippi over James Meredith’s admission; the fieldwork of Medgar Evers, the NAACP, and various activist organizations; and the lingering aura of Emmett Till’s lynching.

Drawing not only on William Faulkner’s gothic-modernist Yoknapatawpha County but also on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s high-adventure Martian pulps, “Jujitsu for Christ” powerfully illuminates vexed questions of racial identity and American history, revealing complexities and subtleties too often overlooked.

It is a remarkable novel about the civil rights era, and how our memories of that era continue to shape our political landscape and to resonate in contemporary conversations about southern identity. But, mostly, it’s very funny, in a mode that’s experimental, playful, sexy, and disturbing all at once. Butler offers a new foreword to the novel. Brannon Costello, a scholar of contemporary southern literature and fan of Butler’s work, writes an afterword that situates the novel in its historical context and in the southern literary canon.

Reading the Spring’s Oxford American, our copies of which are now signed by Jamie Quatro, I am reminded that there is no better way to feel warm and fuzzy about the South. In the editor’s note, Roger Hodge introduces a new a magazine section: Points South. Vignettes, overheards, all approachable and oh-so-Southern. After those comes, graciously framed by white space, a poem.

I first heard Sandra Beasley read a couple of years ago at Millsaps College. She was candid about her work, cheerful, and young with covetable awards behind her name. She had written books of poetry and a memoir about food allergies, a stereotypically whiny topic that she reframed as something lovely and human and very funny. And she is, if you will, Southern.

Sometimes, I think, my generation of Southerners loses our roots among what feel like dishonest or archaic portrayals of the culture of which we are a part. Which is what I love about what this magazine, and Beasley’s poem “King of Mississippi”: they reframe things in a Southern perspective that is very true to my experience of Southness. For my generation, I think, art is community and let poetry ne’er be forgotten just because it is quiet. Read real Southerners.

“Among the kings

the one-eyed man goes blind. Don’t get too close,

his gut growls. What a man hungers to love

 

makes him a bear. What he bears makes him king.”

by Whitney