We’ve Read This Book Club: The Mars Room

Have you vowed to wean yourself off Netflix and get some serious reading done this fall – then have a great chat about what you’ve read with an equally engaged group of book lovers?

Come prepared to delve into Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room, a New York Times Bestseller, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Kushner is also appearing in Wordfest 23rd annual festival from October 8 to 15, 2018. Check out her events here.

This event is hosted by blogger and book reviewer Anne Logan of ivereadthis.com, and is part of Wordfest's monthly book club series on the top floor of Memorial Park Library.

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

From twice National Book Award–nominated Rachel Kushner, whose Flamethrowers was called “the best, most brazen, most interesting book of the year” (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine), comes a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America.

It’s 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision.

Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner’s work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined. As James Wood said in The New Yorker, her fiction “succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive.”

About your host, Anne Logan

Anne Logan worked in the Canadian publishing industry for 7 years, and loved every minute of it. Now she reviews books online at iverreadthis.com, and on-air for CBC Calgary.