Immerse yourself in the settings, cultures, and atmospheres that shape characters and stories.

Each month at 83 Broadway in the Rondout we expand our horizons, engage in rich discussions, and experience how place – more than just a backdrop – can be a character all its own.

Plus enjoy doughnuts 🍩 and coffee ☕.

See all selections here. No registration required.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”