OutBook Book Club

The OutBook Book Club is supported by The Palm Springs Cultural Center and the Palm Springs Public Library. Selections highlight a mix of new LGBTQ releases and influential classics.

OutBook meets on the first Wednesday of the month on Zoom from 7:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m. (PST). To receive meeting information for the OutBook Book Club, please email book club coordinator Hubertus Zegers in advance of the meeting at hwzegers@gmail.com

Click here to see other selections for the OutBook Book Club.

March 3, 2021

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm

—Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

"How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?” Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master “whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness” and “thin, plain, tense, sour” Alice B. Toklas, the “worker bee” who ministered to Stein’s needs throughout their forty-year expatriate “marriage.” As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple’s charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. “The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,” she writes.

Assisted Listening Devices (ALDs) are instruments designed to amplify sounds to make it easier for persons who are hearing‑impaired to enjoy a library program.

Anyone who requires an auxiliary aid or service for effective communication, or a modification of policies or procedures to participate in a program, service, or activity of the City of Palm Springs, should contact the ADA Coordinator, as soon as possible but no later than 48 hours before the scheduled event.