Don't Watch Book Club - How Does It Work?
The next Don't Watch Book Club book has been chosen and we're reading Extended Stay by Juan Martinez!
Join in the reading and then tune in for a book club discussion episode coming up in January 2025.
A little about it:
In a rundown neighborhood in the heart of Las Vegas, the Alicia hotel awakens and beckons to the most vulnerable - those with something to hide.
After his parents are killed in a horrific roadside execution, Alvaro flees his home in Colombia and finds work as a line cook at the seedy hotel. Together with his sister, Carmen, he begins to make a new life in the desert, earning a promotion to management along with an irresistible offer to stay at the hotel rent-free. But as beloved photographs go missing, cockroaches seep from the walls, and grotesque strangers wander the corridors, the promise of the Alicia decays into a nightmare. Alvaro discovers that the hotel is a small appendage of an enormous creature that feeds on guests and their secrets, one that will eventually bring him face-to-face with the memories he most wants to outrun. Alvaro, Carmen, and their friends decide to cooperate with the creature rather than fight it. But in their efforts to appease it, do they sacrifice too much of themselves?
Haunting and visceral, Extended Stay uses the language of body horror and the gothic to comment on the complicated relationship between the Latinx undocumented experience and capitalism, the erasure of those living and working on the margins, the heavy toll exacted by memory, and the queasy permeability of boundaries that separate the waking world from the world of dreams.
How does book club work?
Every month, we'll pick a new book to read through and invite listeners along to read with us so that you can message us your thoughts and opinions on these selections (we can read them on air!)
Want to get special emails from us about book club? We promise we won't bug you. We do promise to be fun and mildly entertaining if we've had enough coffee and adequate sleep though.