Kudos Reading Group

📖 We'll be meeting again next week to discuss Catherine Lacey's novel "Pew"!

⛪️ In a small unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives to a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless, racially ambiguous, and refuses to speak. One family takes the strange visitor in and nicknames them Pew.

🏘 As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origins. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance.

📆 Wednesday, 29 November
🕛 16:00
📍in-person: room TBA (FLLS Building, Pitar Moș)
💻 online: link TBA on Bookclubs

Don't forget to join Bookclubs (link in bio) for all the necessary details (Zoom link & books in e-format)!

See you there!

✒️ Kudos is a student-led reading group organised under the auspices of the British Cultural Studies - University of Bucharest and AmericanStudies Unibuc programmes at the University of Bucharest.

Welcome to our third season of Kudos meetings!

📖 We're happy to announce our line-up for the upcoming months, with some bestselling fiction, experimental literature, q***r narratives, and feminist essays!

📍💻 Each meeting will take place at the end of each respective month, in-person in Bucharest, with the possibility of joining us online as well.

[We provide practice certificates for all students in need of them.]

Stay tuned for more details about our November book, and join us on Bookclubs to download the book in electronic format and stay up to date with our meetings (link in bio).

✒️ Kudos is a student-led reading group organised under the auspices of the British Cultural Studies and American Studies programmes at the University of Bucharest.

Kudos will be meeting again on the 14th of June (15:00) to discuss our May Book of the Month, 𝑮𝒊𝒓𝒍𝒉𝒐𝒐𝒅 by Melissa Febos!

📖 A gripping set of essays about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become. Melissa Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them. When her body began to change at eleven years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defenses she’d developed over years of trying to meet others’ expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs.

♀️ Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny. Written with Febos’ characteristic precision, lyricism, and insight, Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a chosen self.

✒️ Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (2010), and the essay collections, Abandon Me (2017), Girlhood (2021), and Body Work (2022). A four-time MacDowell Colony fellow, she has received several other fellowships. Her essays have won awards from Prairie Schooner and StoryQuarterly, and for five years she was on the Board of Directors of Vida: Women in Literary Arts. Febos has contributed to publications such as The New York Times, The Paris Review, Salon, Bomb, among others.

💻 Join Kudos Reading Group here: https://bookclubs.com/clubs/5959175/join/f212db (where you can also find the Zoom link, the book in electronic format, & a place to chat about all things bookish)

We have had some productive two seasons of our Kudos Reading Group (our British Cultural Studies - University of Bucharest initiative in collaboration with the AmericanStudies Unibuc programme) over the past two years!

💻 We are happy to have had so many interesting conversations, discovered so many books, and met such open-minded, lovely bookworms! Every meeting was filled with intriguing discussions and it was wonderful to get a chance to focus solely on female writers who are revolutionising their genres!

📖 A big thank you to all of our participants so far, and we are looking forward to the last discussion of our second season, Melissa Febos’s ‘Girlhood’ (June date to be announced very soon!).

📚 [new date!] Kudos will be meeting again on the 15th of May (12:00) to discuss our April Book of the Month, 𝑭𝒓𝒖𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑩𝒐𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒔 by Kathrin Harlan.

📖 In stories that beckon and haunt, ‘Fruiting Bodies’ ranges confidently from the fantastical to the gothic to the uncanny as it follows characters — mostly q***r, mostly women — on the precipice of change. Echoes of timeless myth and folklore reverberate through urgent narratives of discovery, appetite, and coming-of-age in a time of crisis.In “The Changeling,” two young cousins wait in dread for a new family member to arrive, convinced that he may be a dangerous supernatural creature. In “Endangered Animals,” Jane prepares to say goodbye to her almost-love while they road-trip across a country irrevocably altered by climate change. In “Take Only What Belongs to You,” a q***r woman struggles with the personal history of an author she idolized, while in “Fiddler, Fool, Pair,” an anthropologist is drawn into a magical—and dangerous—gamble. In the title story, partners Agnes and Geb feast peacefully on the mushrooms that sprout from Agnes’s body—until an unwanted male guest disturbs their cloistered home.

✒️ Kathryn Harlan is a fiction writer and educator. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she now teaches creative and academic writing. Her work has appeared in publications like Strange Horizons, The Gettysburg Review, and The Colorado Review.

💻 Join Kudos Reading Group here: https://bookclubs.com/clubs/5959175/join/f212db (where you can also find the Zoom link, the book in electronic format, & a place to chat about all things bookish)

📚 Mark your calendars! On April 3rd (Monday, 12-14), we are discussing our March Book of the Month, 𝑰𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒎 𝑯𝒐𝒖𝒔𝒆 𝘣𝘺 𝘊𝘢𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘯 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘢 𝘔𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘥𝘰

📖 As Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, the q***r memoir traces the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, and it presents a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Each chapter views the relationship through a different lens, as Machado holds events up to the light and examines them from distinct angles. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction, infusing all with her characteristic wit, playfulness and openness to enquiry. The result is a powerful book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

✒️ Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic. Her debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the Crawford Award. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."

💻 Join Kudos Reading Group via the link in our bio! (where you can also find the Zoom link, the book in electronic format, & a place to chat about all things bookish)

📚 Kudos will be meeting again on the 27th of February (12:00) to discuss our February Book of the Month, 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑩𝒐𝒐𝒌 𝒐𝒇 𝑴𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 by Violaine Huisman.

📖 A gorgeous, critically acclaimed debut novel about a young woman’s coming of age with a dazzling yet damaged mother who lived and loved in extremes. A prizewinning tour de force when it was published in France, Violaine Huisman’s remarkable debut novel is about a daughter’s inextinguishable love for her magnetic, mercurial mother. Beautiful and charismatic, Catherine, a.k.a. “Maman,” smokes too much, drives too fast, laughs too hard, and loves too extravagantly. But when Maman is hospitalized after a third divorce and a breakdown, everything changes. Even as Violaine and her sister long for their mother’s return, once she’s back Maman’s violent mood swings and flagrant disregard for personal boundaries soon turn their home into an emotional landmine. As the story of Catherine’s own traumatic childhood and adolescence unfolds, the pieces come together to form an indelible portrait of a mother as irresistible as she is impossible, as triumphant as she is transgressive.

✒️ Violaine Huisman was born in Paris in 1979 and has lived and worked in New York for twenty years, where she ran the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s literary series and also organized multidisciplinary arts festivals across the city. Originally published by Gallimard under the title ‘Fugitive parce que reine,’ her debut novel The Book of Mother was awarded multiple literary prizes including the Prix Françoise Sagan and the Prix Marie Claire.

💻 Join Kudos Reading Group via the link in our bio! (where you can also find the Zoom link, the book in electronic format, & a place to chat about all things bookish)

We have an exciting four months ahead of us! We gathered a fictional translated novel, a q***r memoir, a collection of fantastical short stories, and a collection of essays. Fancy getting yourself a (digital or physical) copy of these compelling works of fiction and non-fiction & join us at the end of each month?

♦️ 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑩𝒐𝒐𝒌 𝒐𝒇 𝑴𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝘣𝘺 𝘝𝘪𝘰𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘏𝘶𝘪𝘴𝘮𝘢𝘯 (𝘵𝘳. 𝘍𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘩 𝘣𝘺 𝘓𝘦𝘴𝘭𝘪𝘦 𝘊𝘢𝘮𝘩𝘪): a fictional coming-of-age of a young woman with her damaged yet fragile mother; it is an exquisitely wrought story of a mother’s dizzying heights and devastating lows, and a daughter who must hold her memory close in order to let go.

🏚 𝑰𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒎 𝑯𝒐𝒖𝒔𝒆 𝘣𝘺 𝘊𝘢𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘯 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘢 𝘔𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘥𝘰: a q***r memoir about domestic abuse in a le***an relationship, opening up matters of intimacy, violence, and embodiment; by means of various narrative tropes — the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman — Machado looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of le***an relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in q***r relationships.

🍄 𝑭𝒓𝒖𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑩𝒐𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒔 𝘣𝘺 𝘒𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘺𝘯 𝘏𝘢𝘳𝘭𝘢𝘯: a haunting collection of short stories that range from the fantastical to the gothic to the uncanny as it follows characters (mostly q***r, mostly women) on the precipice of change, with echoes of timeless myth and folklore.

🎀 𝑮𝒊𝒓𝒍𝒉𝒐𝒐𝒅 𝘣𝘺 𝘔𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘢 𝘍𝘦𝘣𝘰𝘴: a collection of essays that blends investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, charting how Febos and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny; it is a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a chosen self.

💻 All meetings will be held during the last week of each month (exact date to be announced), and you can find digital copies of all of these works on our Bookclubs platform (link in bio)!

❕️ We also provide participation certificates (5-hour-worth of professional practice).

🦉 We are meeting soon to discuss Claire Oshetsky's Chouette!

🕓 January 30th, 16:00, on Zoom!

💻 Join Kudos Reading Group using the Bookclubs link in our bio (where you can also find the Zoom link, the book in electronic format, & a place to chat about all things bookish)
❕ We provide professional practice certificates (5-hour-worth) for all students who join us & participate in the discussion.

📖 Kudos will be meeting again on the 30th of January (16:00) to discuss our January Book of the Month, 𝑪𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒆𝒕𝒕𝒆 by Claire Oshetsky.

🦉 An exhilarating, provocative novel of motherhood in extremis. Tiny gets pregnant, and her husband is delighted. “You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all,” she warns him. “This baby is an owl-baby.” When Chouette is born small and broken-winged, Tiny works around the clock to meet her daughter’s needs. Left on her own to care for a child who seems more predatory bird than baby, Tiny vows to raise Chouette to be her authentic self. Even in those times when Chouette’s behaviours grow violent and strange, Tiny’s loving commitment to her daughter is unwavering. When she discovers that her husband is on an obsessive and increasingly dangerous quest to find a “cure” for their daughter, Tiny must decide whether Chouette should be raised to fit in or to be herself—and learn what it truly means to be a mother. Arresting, darkly funny, and unsettling, Chouette is a brilliant exploration of ambition, sacrifice, perceptions of ability, and the ferocity of motherly love.

✒️ Claire Oshetsky is a novelist whose writing has appeared in Salon, Wired, and the New York Times. She lives with her family in California. Chouette draws on her own experiences of motherhood.

💻 Join Kudos Reading Group here: https://bookclubs.com/clubs/5959175/join/f212db (where you can also find the Zoom link, the book in electronic format, & a place to chat about all things bookish)

☂️ We are meeting soon to discuss Enriquez's collection of short stories, "The Dangers of Smoking in Bed"!

🕓 January 5th, 16:00, on Zoom!

💻 Join Kudos Reading Group using the Bookclubs link in our bio (where you can also find the Zoom link, the book in electronic format, & a place to chat about all things bookish)
❕ We provide professional practice certificates (5-hour-worth) for all students who join us & participate in the discussion.

💻 Join Kudos Reading Group here: https://bookclubs.com/clubs/5959175/join/f212db (where you can find the Zoom link, the book in electronic format, & a place to chat about all things bookish)

❕ We provide professional practice certificates (5-hour-worth) for all students who join us & participate in the discussion.

📚 Kudos - our BCS initiative in collaboration with AmericanStudies Unibuc - will be meeting on the 5th of January (16:00) to discuss our December Book of the Month, 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝑺𝒎𝒐𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒊𝒏 𝑩𝒆𝒅 by Mariana Enriquez.

📖 As a new collection of singularly unsettling stories, by an Argentine author who has earned comparisons to Shirley Jackson and Jorge Luis Borges, the stories are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken (fe**sh, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history) with unsettling urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can't let go of their idol; an entire neighbourhood is cursed to death by a question of morality they fail to answer correctly.

⛓ Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre: populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with resounding tenderness towards those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, this new collection from one of Argentina's most exciting writers finds Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling.

✒️ Mariana Enriquez is a writer and editor based in Buenos Aires. She is the author of the novel Our Share of Night and has published two story collections in English, Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed , which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Speculative Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction.

💻 Join Kudos Reading Group here: https://bookclubs.com/clubs/5959175/join/f212db (where you can also find the Zoom link, the book in electronic format, & a place to chat about all things bookish)
❕ We provide professional practice certificates (5-hour-worth) for all students who join us & participate in the discussion.