The “In All My Dreams” book club will be held in January and February 2021 in collaboration with Haitianola. It will be an informal gathering of readers interested in discovering or exploring Haitian culture through the prism of one of Haiti’s most important works of literary fiction. We will focus on the novel’s representation of Carnival as a way to join together for a virtual celebration of this year’s Mardi Gras. Sign up for this year’s book club here.
For those who wish to read the novel in English translation, it is published by Akashic Books (with a 25% reduction on the cover price!) and can be ordered easily online, or from an independent bookstore near you.
For those who wish to read the novel in the original French, we recommend the paperback edition from Gallimard.
We have provided brief reading guides, accessible from our home page, indicating the narrative ground we’ll cover in each session, and we offer links to additional resources (for those who enjoy heading down the odd rabbit hole). In addition to sharing visual materials on Instagram using #HadrianaHaitianola, we encourage participants to make use of the comments section on each page – to share thoughts or to pose questions in the days leading up to or following our “live” meetings.
The is the second iteration of the book club, the first of which took place in 2019 and was hosted by literary scholar Kaiama L. Glover and historian Laurent Dubois. This first book club culminated in an event with Edwidge Danticat at the French Embassy of New York and a Hadriana-inspired contemporary Haitian art exhibition. You can check out all of this – including videos of those conversations – right here!
If you are interested in using these resources for teaching or for your own book club and would like to reach out to us to help, please feel free to contact us at hadrianabookclub@gmail.com.