Sub-Rosa is a reading group that meets once a month to discuss feminist and obscure literature.
Our selection for this month is My Ántonia by Willa Cather.
We will meet Saturday, June 28 at 6:30 p.m. at the store.
If you are interested in attending please send us your email to bookbeatorders@gmail.com, message Book Beat on Instagram, or inquire in-store.
Books are in stock now and discounted 15%.
In this symphonically powerful novel, Willa Cather created one of the most winning heroines in American fiction, a woman whose robust high spirits and calm, undemonstrative strength are emblematic of the virtues Cather most admired in her country.
Antonia Shimerda is the daughter of Bohemian immigrants struggling with the oceanic loneliness of life on the Nebraska prairie. Through the eyes of Jim Burden, her tutor and disappointed admirer, we follow Antonia from farm to town and through hardships both natural and human, surviving everything from poverty to a failed romance—and not only surviving, but triumphing. In the end, Antonia is exactly what Burden says she is: a woman who “had that something which fires the imagination, [a woman who] could stop…one’s breath for a moment by a look or a gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things.”
“A book for our times…My Ántonia becomes an education in what it means to be American: to have come from elsewhere, with very little; to be mindful, amid every trapping of prosperity, of how little we once had, and were; to protect and nurture those newly arrived, wherever from, as if they were our own immigrant ancestors—equally scared, equally humble, and equally determined…To read My Ántonia more than a century after its publication is a reminder of the timelessness of America’s bigotries…But, more powerfully, Cather’s novel is a story of a country that can overcome prejudice.”—Bret Stephens, The New York Times
“What’s interesting about My Ántonia is how it manages to function as a perfectly inviting story for young readers, and how an adult willing to revisit it with a more developed critical eye can appreciate it for the subtly sophisticated narrative it truly is. In this regard, it’s not unlike a wildly different book, Alice in Wonderland. Great fun for kids, psychologically captivating for grownups.”—Bradford Marrow, NPR
“[It’s] one of the warmest, most quietly rousing books that I know; a clear-eyed salute to the resilience of the human spirit and the innate hardiness of the immigrants who came across the ocean to start afresh in the golden west.”—Xan Brooks, The Guardian
Willa Cather, author of twelve novels, including O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop, was born in Virginia in 1873 but grew up in Nebraska, where many of her novels are set.
In 1922 she won the Pulitzer Prize for one of her lesser-known books, One of Ours. Her other novels include The Song of the Lark, The Professor’s House, My Mortal Enemy, and Lucy Gayheart. She died in 1947 in New York City.