Join the MacFestival Book Club
to delve into prose reimaginings of the Scottish play!
The MacFestival Book Club
Sponsored by Tyler Meier and Katie Patt
The Bard didn’t just inspire other playwrights — Shakespeare’s influence extends to novels as well! As such, the MacFestival features a book club consisting of four Macbeth-inspired novels! Join other bibliophiles of the Scoundrel and Scamp Theatre for a series of discussions led by our very own Dr. Betsy Labiner.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Discussion on Jan 18 @ 12:30p)
Haunt Me Still by Jennifer Lee Carrell (Discussion on Feb 8th @12:00p)
Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid (Discussion on Mar 9 @ 12:30p)
All's Well by Mona Awad (Discussion on Apr 6 @ 12:30p)
If you attend all four discussions you will be able to get a FREE MacFestival limited-edition enamel pin!
FREE to participate, and donations encouraged and appreciated. Programming like this is only available for free with the support of our community. Please support so we can continue holding events such as this book club.
Purchasing these books? Shop Local!
Visit Antigone Books, just down the street from us at 411 N. 4th Avenue or online at antigonebooks.com.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
Birnam Wood is on the move . . .
A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last.
But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place: he has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam’s founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He’s intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although they’re poles apart politically, it seems Lemoine and the group might have enemies in common. But can Birnam trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?
A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed study of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, unflinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.
Discussion on January 18 @ 12:30p
Haunt Me Still by Jennifer Lee Carrell
A legendary curse, a witch-haunted king, an ancient blade, and all-too-modern murder…
When Kate Stanley heads to Scotland to mount a new production of Macbeth at the foot of Dunsinnan Hill – the stronghold of the real King Macbeth – it doesn’t take long for the legendary curse on Shakespeare’s evil-ridden play to stir. A girl appears dead on the hilltop and then disappears again. An ancient blade goes missing. A trench is filled with blood. And a mysterious tarot card leads Kate into Birnam Wood, where she finds a local woman ritually murdered in circumstances that suggest pagan sacrifice.
With Kate marked as both suspect and future victim, she and Ben Pearl race to discover an early version of Shakespeare’s play, said to contain actual rituals of witchcraft and forbidden knowledge. However much Kate would like to dismiss such rituals as superstition, someone else appears willing to kill for them – and for the cursed manuscript said to be Shakespeare’s darkest secret.
Discussion on February 8 @ 12:00p, with special guest Jennifer Lee Carrell!
Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid
The Lady knows the stories: how her eyes induce madness in men.
The Lady knows she will be wed to the Scottish brute, who does not leave his warrior ways behind when he comes to the marriage bed.
The Lady knows his hostile, suspicious court will be a game of strategy, requiring all of her wiles and hidden witchcraft to survive.
But the Lady does not know her husband has occult secrets of his own. She does not know that prophecy girds him like armor. She does not know that her magic is greater and more dangerous, and that it will threaten the order of the world.
She does not know this yet. But she will.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From #1 New York Times bestselling author Ava Reid comes a “masterful reimagining” (Publishers Weekly) of Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare’s most famous villainess, giving her a voice, a past, and a power that transforms the story men have written for her.
Discussion on March 9 @ 12:30p
All’s Well by Mona Awad
Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now, she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised and cost her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.
That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.
With prose Margaret Atwood has described as “no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged…genius,” Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. All’s Well is a “fabulous novel” (Mary Karr) about a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain.