OutBook Book Club

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

OutBook meets on the first Wednesday of the month in the upstairs VIP room at the Palm Springs Cultural Center from 6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. The book discussion starts at 7:00 p.m. (from 6:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. is a social mixer). For more information, please email book club coordinator Hubertus Zegers at hwzegers@gmail.com in advance of the meeting.

View other selections for the OutBook Book Club.

Most titles are available as Downloadable Audiobooks and/or eBooks from PSPL.

December 7, 2022

The Magician by Colm Tóibín

—A New York Times Notable Book, Critic’s Top Pick, and Top Ten Book of Historical Fiction

From one of today’s most brilliant and beloved novelists, a dazzling, epic family saga set across a half-century spanning World War I, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the Cold War that is “a feat of literary sorcery in its own right” (Oprah Daily).

The Magician opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the twentieth century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles.

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