Members Only: The Literarians

Free

Open to Members Only

Wednesday, 12:30 pm EDT - 2:00 pm EDT July 15, 2020

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The Literarians will be held online via Zoom. Members who have RSVP’d will be contacted with instructions for joining. Please email Allison Escoto at allison@centerforfiction.org with any questions.

The Literarians is a free monthly discussion group open to members of The Center. Led by our head librarian Allison Escoto, The Literarians read a wide variety of contemporary fiction. New participants are welcome throughout the year!

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Up Next:
Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Previous Selections:

Apeirogon by Colum McCann
Milkman by Anna Burns
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
The Parisian by Isabella Hammad
Normal People by Sally Rooney
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
The Burning Girl by Claire Messud
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Led by

Allison Escoto

Head Librarian

Allison Escoto

Head Librarian

New Yorker by way of New Orleans, Allison Escoto received her BA in Creative Writing from SUNY New Paltz and closed out the 90s as a bookseller in Greenwich Village. After several years in publishing, she pursued and received her MLS from Queens College. Since then she has worked as a librarian for 15 years in various libraries in and around NYC and has been moonlighting as a poet and copywriter. She is the Associate Editor for Newtown Literary Journal, a publication dedicated to featuring writers from her beloved Queens.

Up Next

1 .

Buy this book

Deacon King Kong

By James McBride

Published by Riverhead Books

From James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird and the bestselling modern classic The Color of Water, one of the most anticipated novels of the year: a wise and witty tale about what happens to the witnesses of a shooting.

In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range.

The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride’s funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird. In Deacon King Kong, McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.

As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters–caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York–overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.

Bringing to these pages both his masterly storytelling skills and his abiding faith in humanity, James McBride has written a novel every bit as involving as The Good Lord Bird and as emotionally honest as The Color of Water. Told with insight and wit, Deacon King Kong demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us.