Tuesday, January 17 – 7pm
Online
With special guest, author Hilma Wolitzer and her daughter Meg

An NPR Best Book of the Year * A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice * An Electric Literature Best Short Story Collection of the Year * Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize

Both Hilma and Meg Wolitzer are remarkable writers with extensive bibliographies. We are delighted to have this mother-daughter duo join us and would like to encourage you to invite your daughters and mothers to join us for this very special book club meeting.

If you’d like a taste of what these two share, check out the “Mothers Know Best” episode of the podcast of Selected Shorts in which Meg interviews her mother.

From her many well-loved novels, Hilma Wolitzer-now ninety-one years old and at the top of her game-has gained a reputation as one of our best fiction writers, who “raises ordinary people and everyday occurrences to a new height.” (Washington Post) These collected short stories-most of them originally published in magazines including Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post, in the 1960s and 1970s, along with a new story that brings her early characters into the present-are evocative of an era that still resonates deeply today.

In the title story, a bystander tries to soothe a woman who seems to have cracked under the pressures of her life. And in several linked stories throughout, the relationship between the narrator and her husband unfolds in telling and often hilarious vignettes. Of their time and yet timeless, Wolitzer’s stories zero in on the domestic sphere with wit, candor, grace, and an acutely observant eye. Brilliantly capturing the tensions and contradictions of daily life, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket is full of heart and insight, providing a lens into a world that was often unseen at the time, and often overlooked now-reintroducing a beloved writer to be embraced by a whole new generation of readers.  (from Amazon description)

Questions? Book suggestions? Please contact Barbara Klaas at baklaas@gmail.com.