Reading Groups

In Short: Grace Paley’s “An Interest in Life” with Mike Levine

$45

Includes a Complimentary Drink from Our Café & Bar

Out of stock

Thursday, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT September 12, 2024

The Center for Fiction

This single-session group is held in person at The Center for Fiction. Registration includes a complimentary drink from our Café & Bar.

“Grace Paley’s work makes the novel as a form seem virtually redundant,” Angela Carter wrote in The London Review of Books. In this reading group, you’ll dive into Paley’s short story “An Interest in Life” (published in her 1959 debut collection, The Little Disturbances of Man) to see just how much she accomplished with an economy of form.

Paley made brilliant comedy out of the endless trouble of relationships and our equally endless need for each other. Her stories are deeply particular and grounded in the practical concerns of characters struggling with the here and now. But her work also has an expansive quality arising from a powerful undercurrent of desire—for love, understanding, and, most especially, the world as we long for it to be.

What to read before the first meeting: “An Interest in Life” (1959) by Grace Paley. A copy of the story will be sent to participants upon registration.

What to expect from this reading group: The group leader will facilitate a discussion about the story, offering questions and observations that direct the group’s attention to especially rich passages. Participants will be encouraged to form and share their own interpretations of the story.

Capacity: 25

Led by

Mike Levine

Mike Levine

Mike Levine is an independent editor. He was previously an acquisitions editor at Northwestern University Press. Among the authors he published were Jen Beagin (Whiting Award winner), A. E. Stallings (National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, finalist), and Stephen Karam (Pulitzer Prize in Drama, finalist). He has also been a senior editor at the Great Books Foundation. Since 2000, he has taught literature and film seminars in several continuing education programs. He has a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in English from Rice University.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

Groups+Workshops

More Groups+Workshops

Groups+Workshops