Short & Sweet Miniature Literature Book Club

Did you make a goal to read more books? Want to accomplish your goal by reading lots of books but don't have the time or patience to read all those pages? We have a solution for you!

Come join our new Mini lit book club! This book club is all about short & sweet reads with only 200 pages or less!

Our read for this month is "The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip" by George Saunders 

This read is short and sweet at only 88 pages! 

About the Author:

George Saunders was born December 2, 1958 and raised on the south side of Chicago. In 1981 he received a B.S. in Geophysical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He worked at Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, NY as a technical writer and geophysical engineer from 1989 to 1996. He has also worked in Sumatra on an oil exploration geophysics crew, as a doorman in Beverly Hills, a roofer in Chicago, a convenience store clerk, a guitarist in a Texas country-and-western band, and a knuckle-puller in a West Texas slaughterhouse.

After reading in People magazine about the Master's program at Syracuse University, he applied. Mr. Saunders received an MA with an emphasis in creative writing in 1988. His thesis advisor was Doug Unger.

He has been an Assistant Professor, Syracuse University Creative Writing Program since 1997. He has also been a Visiting Writer at Vermont Studio Center, University of Georgia MayMester Program, University of Denver, University of Texas at Austin, St. Petersburg Literary Seminar (St. Petersburg, Russia, Summer 2000), Brown University, Dickinson College, Hobart & William Smith Colleges.

He conducted a Guest Workshop at the Eastman School of Music, Fall 1995, and was an Adjunct Professor at Saint John Fisher College, Rochester, New York, 1990-1995; and Adjunct Professor at Siena College, Loudonville, New York in Fall 1989.

He is married and has two children.

 

About the book:

For as long as anyone can remember, the inhabitants of the tiny seaside village of Frip have raised goats, eking out a living by supplying the neighboring villages with goat milk. For just as long, Frip has been plagued by a colony of dim-witted, multi-eyed, goat-loving aquatic cockleburs known as gappers. Each morning the gappers wriggle from the waves to serenade the smelly objects of their affection and, each day, the weary children of Frip dutifully remove the pests with gapper-brushes, collect them in gapper-sacks, and toss them back into the sea.

As all good things must come to an end—in parables, allegories, and illustrated fables, anyway—the day soon comes when the staid Frippian monoculture must confront a radically new paradigm. More specifically, one morning, a moderately less-stupid gapper realizes that one of the village's three houses is considerably closer to the water's edge than the other two and, for efficiency's sake, he urges his fellow gappers to concentrate their goat-addled adorations on this single location. For the neighboring Romo and Ronson families, this newly gapperless situation is the occasion for considerable self-congratulatory enthusiasm. However, for young Capable and her recently widowed father, who now must treble their gapper-brushing, sacking, and tossing efforts, this turn of events is overwhelming.

Capable's appeals for neighborly assistance are greeted with pompous disbelief ("Are those gappers our gappers? Are those goats our goats?), and her attempts to get rid of the gappers, while ingenious, end in failure...until she decides upon a course of action so simple—and yet so radical—that nothing and no one in the village of Frip will ever be the same.

Hope to see you there!