On March 23, 2023 from 5:00-6:30 in the Milano Room, Downtown Library:

In conjunction with our friends in Leadership Studies, the Center will host a special Women’s History Month Reading Group based on the 1999 novel, The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing. In an insightful essay, “Melissa Bank Deserved More” writer Cara Blue Adams interrogates the inherent sexism that held back author Melissa Bank, who died recently of cancer, only 61 years-old:

“Things have changed somewhat since the Girls’ Guide was published. Publisher’s Marketplace, the industry website that logs book deals, is doing away with the women’s fiction category, finally. Fiction will be commercial, or it will be literary, or it will reside in a genre category that doesn’t make such explicit assumptions about gender. We are making progress. It’s too late for The Girls’ Guide to be received differently in Bank’s lifetime, but it isn’t too late for us to revisit the accomplishments of her fiction.”
 
This reading group session will look at the life and legacy of Melissa Bank, as well as the ways in which publishing has and hasn't changed since her novel came out in 1999.