Morning Coffee Book Club

Read on the Edge with the new  Morning Coffee Book Club.  Join us for a discussion of The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli at 10:00 a.m. in the Cornelia White Community Room at the Welwood Murray Memorial Library.

The WMML Book Club meets on the third Wednesday of the month at 10:00 a.m. at the Welwood Murray Memorial Library and is open to everyone. Members of the club read the selected book for the month, then join in lively discussions. Please click here to see a list of future selections for the WMML Book Club.

Refreshments are generously provided by Aspen Mills Bakery. Thank you, Aspen Mills!

November 16, 2016

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli** 

—Winner of the LA Times Book Award for Fiction

—A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction

—Named one of the best books of 2015 by The New York Times , NPR, The Guardian, Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle

“Luiselli follows in the imaginative tradition of writers like Borges and Márquez, but her style and concerns are unmistakably her own. This deeply playful novel is about the passion and obsession of collecting, the nature of storytelling, the value of objects, and the complicated bonds of family. . . Luiselli has become a writer to watch, in part because it’s truly hard to know (but exciting to wonder about) where she will go next.”—The New York Times

I was born in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City, with four premature teeth and my body completely covered in a very fine coat of fuzz. But I'm grateful for that inauspicious start because ugliness, as my other uncle, Eurípides López Sánchez, was given to saying, is character forming.

Highway is a late-in-life world traveler, yarn spinner, collector, and legendary auctioneer. His most precious possessions are the teeth of the "notorious infamous" like Plato, Petrarch, and Virginia Woolf. Written in collaboration with the workers at a Jumex juice factory in Mexico, The Story of My Teeth is an elegant, witty, exhilarating romp through the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and Luiselli's own literary influences.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. Her work has been translated into many languages and has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's.