Reading Massacre: Book Club Responses to Landscape of Farewell

This article analyzes book club responses to Alex Miller's 2007 novel Landscape of Farewell. It explores the ways in which the dynamics of group reading enabled me to rethink my own problematic relationship to the novel, particularly through the book clubs' engagement with the novel's central massacre scene. It suggests that book club readings can challenge the academic reception of literary texts, and that talking about books can enable difficult conversations about ideas that matter.