Every first and third Thursday from August 2020 until September 2020

Inspired by Walidah Imarisha’s visit to Firestorm, the Visionary Readers Group is designed to engage with “literature that helps us understand existing power dynamics, and helps us imagine paths to creating more just futures” The group is for anyone wanting to explore avenues of increased community engagement, relationship building, and collective visioning.

This round of the VRG will explore two exciting titles. For fiction, we’ll read and discuss Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic sci-fi anarchist utopia “The Dispossessed.” For nonfiction, we’ll check out Cindy Milstein’s “Deciding For Ourselves,” an exciting new anthology detailing contemporary projects in direct democracy across the world.

We’ll meet over Zoom on a bi-weekly basis starting Thursday, August 6th. The full schedule for the reading group can be found below.

August 6th: Meet & Greet, Overview, and Intention Setting
August 20th: This Dispossessed Discussion
September 3rd: Deciding For Ourselves Discussion Part I
September 17th: Deciding For Ourselves Part II

To register, please email [email protected] with the subject title “Visionary Readers Group.”

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The Dispossessed
By Ursula K. Le Guin

A bleak moon settled by utopian anarchists, Anarres has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras—a civilization of warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to reunite the two planets, which have been divided by centuries of distrust. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart.

To visit Urras—to learn, to teach, to share—will require great sacrifice and risks, which Shevek willingly accepts. But the ambitious scientist’s gift is soon seen as a threat, and in the profound conflict that ensues, he must reexamine his beliefs even as he ignites the fires of change.

https://www.firestorm.coop/products/761-the-dispossessed.html

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Deciding for Ourselves: The Promise of Direct Democracy
By Cindy Milstein

In a time of social and ecological crises, people everywhere are looking for solutions. States and capitalism, rather than providing them, only make matters worse. There’s a growing sense that we’ll have to fix this mess on our own. But how? Deciding for Ourselves, in the spirit of the Zapatistas, demonstrates that “the impossible is possible.” A better world through self-determination and self-governance is not only achievable. It is already happening in urban and rural communities around the world–from Mexico to Rojava, Denmark to Greece–as an implicit or explicit replacement for nations, police, and other forms of hierarchical social control. This anthology explores this “sense of freedom in the air,” as one piece puts it, by looking at contemporary examples of autonomous, directly democratic spaces and the real-world dilemmas they experience, all the while underscoring the egalitarian ways of life that are collectively generated in them.

https://www.firestorm.coop/products/14685-deciding-for-ourselves.html

Buncombe County Public Libraries will be opening three additional locations for curbside pickup service, the Fairview, Leicester, and Oakley/South Asheville branches. These locations will operate from 1-5 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, in addition to our current curbside pickup service locations at the Black Mountain, North Asheville, South Buncombe, and West Asheville locations. For more information about library curbside pickup service or to place an item on hold for pickup, please call your local library or the Ask-A-Librarian line (828-250-4700) or visit buncombecounty.org/library. We hope to see you soon!

Buncombe County Public Libraries will be opening three additional locations for curbside pickup service, the Fairview, Leicester, and Oakley/South Asheville branches. These locations will operate from 1-5 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, in addition to our current curbside pickup service locations at the Black Mountain, North Asheville, South Buncombe, and West Asheville locations. For more information about library curbside pickup service or to place an item on hold for pickup, please call your local library or the Ask-A-Librarian line (828-250-4700) or visit buncombecounty.org/library. We hope to see you soon!

Buncombe County Public Libraries will be opening three additional locations for curbside pickup service, the Fairview, Leicester, and Oakley/South Asheville branches. These locations will operate from 1-5 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, in addition to our current curbside pickup service locations at the Black Mountain, North Asheville, South Buncombe, and West Asheville locations. For more information about library curbside pickup service or to place an item on hold for pickup, please call your local library or the Ask-A-Librarian line (828-250-4700) or visit buncombecounty.org/library. We hope to see you soon!

The event is free but an RSVP is required. Please click here to RSVP for this event! If you elect to attend, we will email you prior to the event with the link required to attend.

We’re excited to host this conversation with Ilona Andrews and Jeaniene Frost, moderated by Megan Corbett of Frolic Media!

“Ilona Andrews” is the pseudonym for a husband-and-wife writing team. Ilona is a native-born Russian and Gordon is a former communications sergeant in the U.S. Army. Contrary to popular belief, Gordon was never an intelligence officer with a license to kill, and Ilona was never the mysterious Russian spy who seduced him. They met in college, in English Composition 101, where Ilona got a better grade. (Gordon is still sore about that.)

Gordon and Ilona currently reside in Texas with their two children and many dogs and cats.

They have co-authored several bestselling series, including the #1 NYT bestselling urban fantasy of Kate Daniels, rustic fantasy of the Edge, paranormal romance of Hidden Legacy, and Innkeeper Chronicles, which they post as a free weekly serial. For complete list of their books, fun extras, and Innkeeper installments, please visit their website at Ilona-andrews.com.

Emeral Blaze Order below to receive a signed bookplate!

Ilona Andrews, #1 New York Times bestselling author, continues her spellbinding series set in the Hidden Legacy world where magic controls everything…except the hearts of those who wield it.

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Buncombe County Public Libraries will be opening three additional locations for curbside pickup service, the Fairview, Leicester, and Oakley/South Asheville branches. These locations will operate from 1-5 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, in addition to our current curbside pickup service locations at the Black Mountain, North Asheville, South Buncombe, and West Asheville locations. For more information about library curbside pickup service or to place an item on hold for pickup, please call your local library or the Ask-A-Librarian line (828-250-4700) or visit buncombecounty.org/library. We hope to see you soon!

The first book we’re reading is Amanda’s pic Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson.

Total transparency – I have never run a book club or been part of one so aside from watching Oprah back in the day, I got nothing in terms of process. Maybe we pick apart a theme(s) of the book and go from there? Open to suggestions

And if you show up without having read the book, you will be made to walk the streets of Asheville like Cersei Lannister as we yell “Shame! Shame!” at you. (YouTube it if you have no idea what I’m talking about) :)