Reading Groups

Flâneur/Flâneuse: Novels of Wandering with Jennifer Stock

3 Sessions Tuesdays, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT July 1 to August 12, 2025

The Center for Fiction

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The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at a 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
7/1, 7/22, 8/12
In Person at The Center for Fiction

In this reading group, we’ll look at three novels where walking and wandering play a central role. Casting off habitual perceptions and preoccupations, our narrators take long, rambling walks, creating a free-wheeling narrative momentum which ignites potent and surprising meditations on history, memory, art, and culture. Two of our three narrators draw on the tradition of the flâneur/flâneuse, urban wanderers who explore the ever-shifting creative possibilities of the city. Using short passages from Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust and Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse for context, we’ll consider the ways in which our three novels use wandering as a structural device and as a metaphor for the labyrinthine possibilities of the self.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Open City by Teju Cole

What to expect from this reading group: This group is seminar-style and participant-driven, with some initial structure and observations to focus and warm up our conversations.

Reading List:

Session I: Open City by Teju Cole
Session II: Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
Session III: The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

Led by

Jennifer Stock

Jennifer Stock

Jennifer Stock is a writer whose work has appeared in the Iowa Review, the Yale Review, the New England Review, the Georgia Review, and others. Her essays “Alice and Jean,” “Lighter than Air” and “Parrot on a Stone Plinth” were awarded Notable distinctions in the Best American Essays of 2019, 2021, and 2023. Her debut essay collection, Object Lessons, was a finalist for the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize in 2024, and she was the recipient of the 2019 New England Review Award for Emerging Writers. She holds a B.A. in English and Music from Yale and a Ph.D in Music Composition from the City University of New York. She is currently a Lecturer in Writing at Yale.

About this series

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