![\"mating\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/mating.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nOn April 7, at our annual Spring Revel<\/a>, we\u2019re honoring Norman Rush<\/a> with our Hadada Prize, presented each year to \u201ca distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.\u201d To celebrate, the Daily<\/em> is hosting a book club of sorts.<\/p>\n Starting next Monday, March 16, we\u2019re running a series of posts about Rush\u2019s seminal 1991 novel, Mating<\/em><\/a>. Twice a week, from start to finish, we\u2019ll have writers examine a twenty-five-page installment of the book\u2014not just to discuss the plot, but to offer the same spirit of reflection, debate, and restless inquiry that animates the novel itself. Whether you\u2019re an avid fan of the book or completely new to it, we invite you to read along. <\/p>\n Norman Rush. Photo \u00a9 Wyatt Mason<\/p><\/div>\n Mating<\/em>, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1991, takes place in Botswana in the early 1980s; its narrator, an American anthropologist in her early thirties, is brilliant, sui generis, and on the make. With an exploded thesis on her hands, she decides to pursue Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who\u2019s set up a utopian experiment in the Kalahari Desert: a radically matriarchal society by and for impoverished African women. Full of brio and dry wit, Mating<\/em> is at once a romance, a picaresque, and a bracing novel of ideas: in its orbit you\u2019ll find meditations on everything from feminism to geopolitics, from George K. Zipf\u2019s principle of least effort to earwax. Jim Shepard, writing for the\u00a0New York Times Book Review<\/em>, said that\u00a0Mating<\/em> \u201cseeks to illuminate the nature of true intimacy<\/a>\u2014how to define it, how to know when one has achieved it. And few books evoke so eloquently that state of love at its apogee.\u201d And the book has influenced a whole generation of novelists: in a poll by the Times Book Review<\/em>, writers under forty voted Mating<\/em> one of the best American novels of the last quarter century.<\/p>\n We hope you\u2019ll pick up a copy of Mating<\/em><\/a> and join us. We\u2019re also giving away copies to three readers\u2014just retweet the announcement below to enter the lottery. We\u2019ll choose three winners at random after twenty-four hours.<\/p>\n We\u2019re starting a book club for Norman Rush\u2019s MATING\u2014read along! RT for a chance to win a copy: http:\/\/t.co\/GqOFojBGkB<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/tMfoxwmLHZ<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 The Paris Review (@parisreview) March 9, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/a>\n