Join the Lattes & Lit Book Club for our upcoming discussion of The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez on Tuesday, November 19 at 4 p.m.!
The book club will meet in the Idea Lab on the 1st floor of Lauinger Library for a discussion co-hosted with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in collaboration with the Georgetown University Library and the Midnight Mug. RSVP here!
This Month's Book
The Cemetery of Untold Stories is centered around protagonist, Alma Cruz, a renowned writer determined not to follow the fate of a fellow novelist friend who pushed herself so hard to complete a book that it nearly drove her mad.
After inheriting a small piece of land in the Dominican Republic, Alma comes up with a creative plan to transform the land into a graveyard for her unfinished stories. Despite burying the characters and drafts that she couldn’t fully realize, their presence still lingers in her mind.
Alma hopes to lay these characters to rest, but they have other plans. They begin to speak up, sometimes to Alma and sometimes to each other, revising their fates and continuing to evolve. Filomena, a local woman Alma hires to care for the grounds, becomes a confidante to the characters' unsung stories.
Among the buried characters are the forsaken wife of a dictator who was erased from historical memory and a doctor who once fought for the Dominican underground before fleeing to the U.S.
Want to get started on our upcoming reads for the spring?
In January, Lattes & Lit will read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. The discussion will be facilitated by Spanish and Portuguese graduate student Iván Diez De la Pava and SCS student Adriana Cortes Buelvas. A poll to find the best meeting time will be included in the library’s December newsletter.
At the end of the Spring semester, we’ll discuss The Rent Collector by Camron Wright. Stay tuned for a poll in an upcoming newsletter to find a meeting time in March or April.