Join the Vox Book Club!

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a group of London merchants the exclusive right to British trading with the East Indies, along with the right to wage war, if necessary. In 1757, what was now known as the East India Company put the license to use, attacked, and ultimately took control of Mughal Bengal, then one of the wealthiest provinces in one of the world’s wealthiest empires.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

This June, the Vox Book Club is reading the playful, provocative, and thoughtful new novel The Immortal King Rao, by former Wall Street Journal tech reporter and New Yorker business editor Vauhini Vara. Part intimate family drama, part technological allegory, and part alternate history turned dystopia, The Immortal King Rao spans centuries and continents to draw a damning portrait of life under technological capitalism.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

The Fortress of Solitude, the 2003 novel by Jonathan Lethem that is the Vox Book Club’s pick for May, seems in memory to take place in a single golden childhood summer. It’s a shimmering evocation of a Brooklyn kid’s holiday that feels almost painfully beautiful: the days are eternal, the spaldeens bouncing off the brownstone walls pink and perfect, the water from the fire hydrants shockingly cold — and at certain moments, as you leap in the air to catch a wallball, it almost seems like you can fly.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

This May, the Vox Book Club is reading Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, one of the loveliest and most prescient novels of the 2000s. It follows two motherless boys growing up in the Brooklyn of the 1970s, one Black and one white. As Lethem tracks the intimate rise and ugly fall of their friendship, he offers a fraught and painful love letter to New York before the endemic gentrification of the 1990s: the graffiti, the music, the violence.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

In Carmen Maria Machado’s dazzling debut short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, the Vox Book Club’s pick for April, everything always comes back to the body.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World is one of the weirdest and most beautiful books I’ve read in a while. It deals with the horror of trying to understand the world, and how as the scientific concepts we use to try to describe reality edge closer and closer to reality, they move further away from the mundane world that we see and live in with our small human senses.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties is one of those books you just never stop thinking about. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since I first picked it up five years ago — which is why it’s the Vox Book Club’s pick for April 2022.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

Benjamín Labatut’s haunting, astonishing When We Cease to Understand the World, the Vox Book Club’s pick for March, is a book of cosmic awe and cosmic horror. Again and again, it spirals around the connections between science and madness, science and beauty, science and war.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

This March, the Vox Book Club is teaming up with Vox’s science podcast Unexplainable to see what we can make of Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, one of the weirdest and most beautiful books to come out last year.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, the Vox Book Club’s pick for February, is a novel about how we treat our dead.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

We’re now far enough into the pandemic that the first wave of pandemic novels have come out, and if we’re being completely honest, most of them are bad. They’re too boring, or too simple, or too cruel, or they go on about sourdough too much, or they cheerfully announce that the whole thing ended in May 2021 and by now everything is back to normal. No thank you!

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

One of the most striking things about the internet in No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood’s debut novel and the Vox Book Club’s pick for January, is how physical it feels. Most internet novels treat the internet as a place of abstractions, somewhere disembodied and fleshless. But rendered in Lockwood’s perverse, funny poet’s prose, this internet is embodied, is warm, is heaving with breath.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

Fake Accounts, the Vox Book Club pick for December, is an odd book. I think it’s very good; I don’t know that I particularly like it. It is difficult to talk about, apparently by design.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

This winter, the Vox Book Club is going to spend some time thinking about the place where we all seem to live half our lives these days: the internet.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, the Vox Book Club’s pick for November, takes place in a very specific age indeed. It’s 2015, the lead-up to the 2016 election. President Barack Obama is in office, Hillary Clinton is expected to be the next president, and pundits are given to smugly declaring America to be post-racist and post-sexist.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

The American literary canon isn’t short on nightmarish Thanksgiving scenes, but I think the cringiest Thanksgiving I’ve ever read about appears at the climax of Kiley Reid’s witty and biting debut novel, Such a Fun Age.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

Two years ago, I saw a book at a library exhibit that once belonged to a medieval nunnery. It was a fat, old tome on the history of the popes that looked unspeakably dull, and it was open in its display case to the entry on Pope Joan, the apocryphal figure who was thought to have disguised her gender and become pope in the Middle Ages.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

Here is a question for you: Would you like to read a book about witchy medieval nuns creating a separatist women-only commune in 12th-century England and then writing poetry and bathing in lakes at night?

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

One of the dangers of thinking about Piranesi, Susanna Clarke’s uncommonly beautiful second novel and the Vox Book Club’s September pick, is that you can get trapped in the question of whether you are interpreting too much.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

This September, the Vox Book Club is reading one of the best and weirdest books of the past few years: Piranesi, by Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell author Susanna Clarke. Then, at the end of the month, we’ll be meeting with Clarke herself live on Zoom — and you can join us.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

Susanna Clarke’s haunting, haunted Piranesi is one of the most astonishing books I’ve read in a very long time, sort of Narnia meets Paradise Lost meets Borges. From the author of the much-beloved Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, it tells the story of a man called Piranesi, living all alone in a vast and flooded marble house, full of statues.

The big thing in Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, the Vox Book Club’s June pick, is all of the, well, things. This book is nearly encyclopedic in its accounting of the pleasures of modern bourgeois American life.

Marble countertops and a copper pot-filler at the stove. Pasta tossed with herbs and garlic and that salted European butter that comes in a cylinder. All-white linens in the bathroom and the laundry soap hidden in a tasteful wooden box. At times, reading Leave the World Behind can put you in something approaching the same state of blank tranquility you find scrolling through a lifestyle influencer’s Instagram feed.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

The Vox Book Club’s May book pick was Sanjena Sathian’s biting social satire of immigrant ambition, Gold Diggers. And as is our tradition, we met up with Sathian at the end of the month to talk the book through on Zoom. Together, we discussed the tricks of a dual point of view, what to do with bad criticism, and how to write a heist.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

This June, the Vox Book Club is reading what is probably the best vacation book in recent years: Rumaan Alam’s National Book Award finalist Leave the World Behind, about a vacation that goes terribly, terribly wrong.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

Sanjena Sathian’s Gold Diggers, the Vox Book Club pick for May, is about a lot of things: being Indian American, alchemy, ambition, heists. But it is also, on a deep level, a novel about sin. Sin is the hinge on which the story’s plot turns. It is the thing that closes the door on our protagonists’ innocently cruel adolescence and brings him into numbing, corrupted adulthood.