Reading Groups

No Sleep Till Brooklyn: Novels of a Changing Borough with Pam Newton

3 Sessions Wednesdays, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT June 25 to August 13, 2025

The Center for Fiction

featured-images.reading-groups.202505063

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

Meeting Dates:
6/25, 7/16, 8/13
In Person at The Center for Fiction

Brooklyn is both part of the larger New York City landscape and a place with its own history and stories to tell. The borough is a patchwork of residential neighborhoods, where diverse populations have to learn how to live together and where nothing ever stays the same for very long. In this group, we’ll read three novels set in Brooklyn: Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters (1970), and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2004). Each novel is concerned with characters growing up and finding out who they really are, and each unfolds within the specific context of race and class tensions on the streets of Brooklyn. We’ll contemplate gentrification, immigration, graffiti-tagging, stoop-sitting, and feral cats, as we read, think, and talk about what it means to call Brooklyn home.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones

What to expect from this reading group: This will be more of a conversation than a lecture, but the instructor will be on hand to provide some context and guide the exploration of the novels.

Reading List:

Session I: Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall
Session II: Desperate Characters by Paula Fox
Session III: The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

Led by

Pam Newton

Pam Newton

Pam Newton teaches writing in the English department at Yale University and is a freelance magazine writer. Her articles, mostly personal essays and art/culture journalism, have appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times magazine, Time Out New York, the Huffington Post, American Theatre, the National Book Review, LitHub, and elsewhere. She has taught writing and literature for many years to a wide range of ages, including a decade teaching in the Humanities faculty at Cooper Union and directing the Writing Fellows program there. She has a B.A. in Drama from Northwestern University and an M.A. in English Literature from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College.

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