Kudos Reading Group

We have had some productive two seasons of our Kudos Reading Group (our British Cultural Studies - University of Bucharest initiative in collaboration with the AmericanStudies Unibuc programme) over the past two years!

💻 We are happy to have had so many interesting conversations, discovered so many books, and met such open-minded, lovely bookworms! Every meeting was filled with intriguing discussions and it was wonderful to get a chance to focus solely on female writers who are revolutionising their genres!

📖 A big thank you to all of our participants so far, and we are looking forward to the last discussion of our second season, Melissa Febos’s ‘Girlhood’ (June date to be announced very soon!).

📚 [new date!] Kudos will be meeting again on the 15th of May (12:00) to discuss our April Book of the Month, 𝑭𝒓𝒖𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑩𝒐𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒔 by Kathrin Harlan.

📖 In stories that beckon and haunt, ‘Fruiting Bodies’ ranges confidently from the fantastical to the gothic to the uncanny as it follows characters — mostly q***r, mostly women — on the precipice of change. Echoes of timeless myth and folklore reverberate through urgent narratives of discovery, appetite, and coming-of-age in a time of crisis.In “The Changeling,” two young cousins wait in dread for a new family member to arrive, convinced that he may be a dangerous supernatural creature. In “Endangered Animals,” Jane prepares to say goodbye to her almost-love while they road-trip across a country irrevocably altered by climate change. In “Take Only What Belongs to You,” a q***r woman struggles with the personal history of an author she idolized, while in “Fiddler, Fool, Pair,” an anthropologist is drawn into a magical—and dangerous—gamble. In the title story, partners Agnes and Geb feast peacefully on the mushrooms that sprout from Agnes’s body—until an unwanted male guest disturbs their cloistered home.

✒️ Kathryn Harlan is a fiction writer and educator. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she now teaches creative and academic writing. Her work has appeared in publications like Strange Horizons, The Gettysburg Review, and The Colorado Review.

💻 Join Kudos Reading Group here: https://bookclubs.com/clubs/5959175/join/f212db (where you can also find the Zoom link, the book in electronic format, & a place to chat about all things bookish)