Book Club

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on a bridge, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond that has the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.

The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which our lives are changed by the most unlikely of people. When Hai takes a job at a diner to support himself and Grazina, his fellow workers become the family he didn’t expect to find. United by desperation and circumstance, and existing on the fringes of society, together they bear witness to each other’s survival.

This is an unforgettable story of unexpected friendship and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.

Marco Astolfi is a literary translator, writer and fairy from Italy. He lives in Berlin, is a co-organizer of the Village Heart Circle for GBTQ men and runs the Book Club evening every two months. He is a regular at Creative Writing and can occasionally be found modeling for Life Drawing classes. He attended the One Year Training in 2018 and led the Cock O’Clock workshops at Easter Stretch Festival 2019 and Private Talk at Stretch Imagina 2020.

About the Village Book Club
Book lovers and bookworms have been meeting on a bimonthly basis to discuss works of fiction and non-fiction (novels, biographies, and essays) focused on or related to GBTQ themes and personalities.
Anticipating insightful discussions, we choose the next book two months in advance.
While the evening discussions are conducted in English, participants are welcome to read the selected books in their preferred language.