Well-Read Black Girl Book Club Reads WAYWARD LIVES BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

Our Well-Read Black Girl book club chats about the award winning and moving history of queer, Black women at the turn of the century.

ABOUT THE CLUB

The Well-Read Black Girl Book Club is a national book club started by Glory Edim that meets physically within Indie Bookstores. We read books that center on Black women and non-binary folk's stories and all are welcome to attend. The club reads a variety of genres, classics, new literature and nonfiction, and YA that covers the breadth of experience from the diaspora. Loyalty's club often reads along with the national club recs and sometimes reads local area authors from Chocolate City. We often feature selections from the Well-Read Black Girl Anthology as well.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism

"Exhilarating…A rich resurrection of a forgotten history." —Parul Sehgal, New York Times

Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women’s radical aspirations and insurgent desires.