This year's book discussion will center around literary prizes. We meet at 5:00 on the 2nd Thursday at the Main Library, 305 Wick Ave., in the 2nd floor meeting room.
Our December title is Be Holding by Ross Gay, winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award.
This book is available from The Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County, in hard copy, and can be reserved via Search Ohio. It is also available at the YSU Barnes & Noble.
"Be Holding is a love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving—known as Dr. J—who dominated courts in the 1970s and ‘80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia ‘76ers, as well as over his career in both the NBA and ABA. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Ross Gay connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.” https://upittpress.org/books/9780822966234/
Other books in this series:
January: (novel) American Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, John Leonard Prize: There, There by Tommy Orange February: (essays) MacArthur "Genius" Award: A Little Devil in America: Notes In Praise Of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib March: (novel) Orange Prize for Fiction: The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht April (non-fiction) National Book Award: All That She Carried by Tiya Miles May: (biography) Pulitzer: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser