New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Book Club

Join monthly or come as you wish. Bookseller Marni will host a book club that will read through the entire list of the NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. This is meant to be a low-stakes community gathering so come as you are at any stage in reading the book!

We are not charging a fee for this event but do require that participants purchase the book from our store each month that they participate. Books can be purchased ahead of the book club or at the meeting. If cost is prohibitive we ask that you borrow from the Montclair Public Library.

February Pick: by Saidiya Hartman

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Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women’s radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

• 2020 American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Prize winner• 2020 Lionel Trilling Book Award winner• 2021 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction winner• 2020 Publishing Triangle Award winner• 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award winner• 2020 Lambda Literary Award short-listed• 2020 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award short-listed• 2019 Modern Language Association William Sanders Scarborough Prize commendation• 2020 American Historical Association Joan Kelly Memorial Prize winner• 2020 Organization of American Historians Mary Nickliss Prize winner• 2020 James Tait Black Prize short-listed

Host or Publisher Watchung Booksellers