The Reading Across Borders book club focuses on literature in English translation, with a particular interest in writers who are not (yet) well-known in the English-speaking world. Hosted by former store staffer Helen Chau Bradley, the book club meetings take place every two months, and are open to all.

For our next meeting, on Wednesday, August 23, we will meet at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly (211 Bernard ouest) at 7 pm to discuss Teffi's Subtly Worded, translated from the Russian Anne Marie Jackson. Join us for discussion and drinks!

**We offer a 15% discount on Subtly Worded from now until the meeting date.**

We regret that the bookstore is not wheelchair accessible. There are two steps at the entrance, followed by two doors that open inward. Once inside, there are no additional steps to access the bathroom, although the bathroom space is narrow.

Teffi was the pen name of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, who rose to literary fame in St Petersberg before the Revolution, and later reinvented herself amongst the lesrusses, the Russian émigrés of Paris. She was known as a humorist, but, as she herself wrote, "An anecdote is funny when it is being told, but when someone lives it, it's a tragedy." This collection spans her writing career, from 1910 until her death in 1952, and gives a sense of her great range. There are brief satires; strange, dark tales of childhood; an utterly chilling non-fiction piece about her encounters with the hallowed and reviled Rasputin; and later, longer stories that teeter on the edges of magic and death. Teffi was forgotten for decades after her death, but has recently been rediscovered by Russian readers. English readers would do well to follow suit!