Stoner Book Club
It has been called "The perfect novel". John Williams' 1964 masterpiece that documents the quiet life of academic antihero William Stoner is a beautiful and life-affirming work of fiction that will pack the entirety of another person's life into your memory and lodge itself there forever.
To celebrate this book, we are offering a loosely-guided book club. If you were part of our Ulysses book club, this one will be a lot less guided, just offering check-ins and guided reading through the bookclubs.com website.
The book club includes a yellow t-shirt with the first edition cover art, redrawn as a four-colour screenprint by @rileytown and a copy of the book. Also available are grinders and a gravity water pipe featuring the same art. The book you receive will be the in-print NYRB edition.
When you place an order, please include your email and you'll eventually be sent an invite for the bookclub, which will take place at some point this Summer once everyone has their books. There will be limited spots available so please don't wait to sign up!
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On the text:
"William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams's luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world."
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Shirts will be printed by Artee on Gildan 5k blanks