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Overview
Atomic Books is a legendary indie bookstore specializing in small press, graphic novels, contemporary art and literature.
People come into the shop all the time and ask, "Where's your romance section?" We repress the urge to ask, "What kind of bookstore are you mistaking us for?" Instead, we say, "Sorry, we don't have a romance section." So as a compromise, or perhaps just to further confuse things, we decided our 2025 theme would be our take: Bad Love.
Note: When buying your book at Atomic Books, let our bookseller know you're getting it for book club and you'll get 15% off. When buying the book club books online, just enter the coupon code BADLOVE2025 to get your discount.
Discussions are always the last Tuesday of the month, 7pm, in Eightbar.
People come into the shop all the time and ask, "Where's your romance section?" We repress the urge to ask, "What kind of bookstore are you mistaking us for?" Instead, we say, "Sorry, we don't have a romance section." So as a compromise, or perhaps just to further confuse things, we decided our 2025 theme would be our take: Bad Love.
Note: When buying your book at Atomic Books, let our bookseller know you're getting it for book club and you'll get 15% off. When buying the book club books online, just enter the coupon code BADLOVE2025 to get your discount.
Discussions are always the last Tuesday of the month, 7pm, in Eightbar.
Atomic Reading Club 2025: Bad Love
2 participants (12 books)
Overview
Atomic Books is a legendary indie bookstore specializing in small press, graphic novels, contemporary art and literature.
People come into the shop all the time and ask, "Where's your romance section?" We repress the urge to ask, "What kind of bookstore are you mistaking us for?" Instead, we say, "Sorry, we don't have a romance section." So as a compromise, or perhaps just to further confuse things, we decided our 2025 theme would be our take: Bad Love.
Note: When buying your book at Atomic Books, let our bookseller know you're getting it for book club and you'll get 15% off. When buying the book club books online, just enter the coupon code BADLOVE2025 to get your discount.
Discussions are always the last Tuesday of the month, 7pm, in Eightbar.
People come into the shop all the time and ask, "Where's your romance section?" We repress the urge to ask, "What kind of bookstore are you mistaking us for?" Instead, we say, "Sorry, we don't have a romance section." So as a compromise, or perhaps just to further confuse things, we decided our 2025 theme would be our take: Bad Love.
Note: When buying your book at Atomic Books, let our bookseller know you're getting it for book club and you'll get 15% off. When buying the book club books online, just enter the coupon code BADLOVE2025 to get your discount.
Discussions are always the last Tuesday of the month, 7pm, in Eightbar.
Challenge Books
1

So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men
Claire Keegan
January
From Booker Prize Finalist and bestselling author of “pitch perfect” (Boston Globe) Small Things Like These, comes a tryptich of stories about love, lust, betrayal, and the ever-intriguing interchanges between women and men.
Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, considered “among the form’s most masterful practitioners” (New York Times), Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories, newly revised and expanded, together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan’s earliest to her most recent work.
In “So Late in the Day,” Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently; in “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions; and in “Antarctica,” a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.
Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and men: a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence. Potent, charged, and breathtakingly insightful, these three essential tales will linger with readers long after the book is closed.
2

Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees
Patrick Horvath
February
Don’t. Murder. The locals.
This is small-town serial killer, upstanding citizen, and adorable brown bear Samantha Strong’s cardinal rule. After all, there’s a sea of perfectly ripe potential victims in the big city just beyond the forest, and when you’ve worked as hard as Sam to build a cozy life and a thriving business in a community surrounded by friendly fellow animal folk, warm decor, and the aroma of cedar trees and freshly baked apple pie…the last thing you want is to disturb the peace.
So you can imagine her indignation when one of Woodbrook’s own meets a grisly, mysterious demise—and you wouldn’t blame her for doing anything it takes to hunt down her rival before the town self-destructs and Sheriff Patterson starts (literally) barking up the wrong tree.
Cute critters aren’t immune to crime in this original graphic novel debut by writer-artist Patrick Horvath.
3

Nightbitch
Rachel Yoder
In this blazingly smart and voracious debut, an artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced she's turning into a dog.
One day, the mother was a mother, but then one night, she was quite suddenly something else...
An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, casually dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms.
As the mother's symptoms intensify, and her temptation to give in to her new dog impulses peak, she struggles to keep her alter-canine-identity secret. Seeking a cure at the library, she discovers the mysterious academic tome which becomes her bible, A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography, and meets a group of mommies involved in a multilevel-marketing scheme who may also be more than what they seem.
An outrageously original novel of ideas about art, power, and womanhood wrapped in a satirical fairy tale, Nightbitch will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. And you should. You should howl as much as you want.
"A feral, unholy marriage of Tillie Olsen and Kafka—Nightbitch is an incredible feat."—CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
4

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
Claire Dederer
From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, a passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of #MeToo, and of the link between genius and monstrosity.
In this unflinching, deeply personal book that expands on her instantly viral Paris Review essay, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?" Claire Dederer asks: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Naipaul, Miles Davis, or Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss? She explores the audience's relationship with artists from Woody Allen to Michael Jackson, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other?
Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.
5

This Is How You Lose the Time War
Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: "Burn before reading."
Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.
Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That’s how war works, right?
Co-written by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.
6

Ice Planet Barbarians
Ruby Dixon
Fall in love with the out-of-this-world romance between Georgie Carruthers, a human woman, and Vektal, an alien from another planet.
You’d think being abducted by aliens would be the worst thing that could happen to me. And you’d be wrong. Because now the aliens are having ship trouble, and they’ve left their cargo of human women—including me—on an ice planet.
We’re not equipped for life in this desolate winter wasteland. Since I’m the unofficial leader, I head out into the snow to look for help.
I find help all right. A big blue horned alien introduces himself in a rather . . . startling way. Vektal says that I'm his mate, his chosen female—and that the reason his chest is purring is because of my presence. He’ll help me and my people survive, but this poses a new problem.
If Vektal helps us survive, I’m not sure he’s going to want to let me go.
7

Pizza Girl
Jean Kyoung Frazier
In the tradition of audacious and wryly funny novels like The Idiot and Convenience Store Woman comes the wildly original coming-of-age story of a pregnant pizza delivery girl who becomes obsessed with one of her customers.
Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She's grieving the death of her father (whom she has more in common with than she'd like to admit), avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future.
Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled-covered pizzas for her son's happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other toward middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways.
Bold, tender, propulsive, and unexpected in countless ways, Jean Kyoung Frazier's Pizza Girl is a moving and funny portrait of a flawed, unforgettable young woman as she tries to find her place in the world.
8

Crash
J.G. Ballard
August - get the audiobook here at Libro.fm
When J. G. Ballard, our narrator, smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes.
Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of autoerotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash―a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant, and iconic celebrity.
First published in 1973, Crash remains one of the most shocking novels of the twentieth century and was made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg.
9

The Price of Salt, or Carol
Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith's story of romantic obsession may be one of the most important, but still largely unrecognized, novels of the twentieth century. First published in 1952 and touted as "the novel of a love that society forbids," the book soon became a cult classic.
Based on a true story plucked from Highsmith's own life, The Price of Salt (or Carol) tells the riveting drama of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose routine is forever shattered by a gorgeous epiphany―the appearance of Carol Aird, a customer who comes in to buy her daughter a Christmas toy. Therese begins to gravitate toward the alluring suburban housewife, who is trapped in a marriage as stultifying as Therese's job. They fall in love and set out across the United States, ensnared by society's confines and the imminent disapproval of others, yet propelled by their infatuation. The Price of Salt is a brilliantly written story that may surprise Highsmith fans and will delight those discovering her work.
"A great American writer… Highsmith's writing is wicked…it puts a spell on you." ―Entertainment Weekly
10

Killshot
Elmore Leonard
Ironworker Wayne Colson and his spirited wife Carmen are witnesses to a shakedown scam - witnesses who must be eliminated. Enter Armand Degas, aka Blackbird, the brains of the operation, and his partner Richie Nix, an ex-con whose main goal is to rob a bank in every state. A lively chase ensues when the Colsons enter the Federal Witness Security Program with two bumbling but determined killers on their trail.
With its dead-on dialogue, memorable characters, and absolute authenticity, this is one of Elmore Leonard's all-time great novels.
“A Hollywood hit…. Taut, inimitable prose and characters who could have only sprung from the mind of Elmore Leonard.”
—Detroit News
11

Eve's Hollywood
Eve Babitz
A legendary love letter to Los Angeles by the city's most charming daughter, complete with portraits of rock stars at Chateau Marmont, surfers in Santa Monica, prostitutes on sunset, and Eve's own beloved cat, Rosie.
Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she’d hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz’s first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve’s Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high-school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz’s prose might appear careening, she’s in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers.
This “daughter of the wasteland” is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds—and every bit as seductive as she is.
12

My Sister, the Serial Killer
Oyinkan Braithwaite
A short, darkly funny, hand grenade of a novel about a Nigerian woman whose younger sister has a very inconvenient habit of killing her boyfriends.
"Femi makes three, you know. Three and they label you a serial killer."
Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola's third boyfriend in a row is dead.
Korede's practicality is the sisters' saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood, the trunk of her car is big enough for a body, and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures of her dinner to Instagram when she should be mourning her "missing" boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit.
Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. She dreams of the day when he will realize that she's exactly what he needs. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola's phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she's willing to go to protect her.
Sharp as nails and full of deadpan wit, Oyinkan Braithwaite's deliciously deadly debut is as fun as it is frightening.