Reading Groups

Members Only: The Literarians

Free

RSVP Below

Wednesday, 12:30 pm EDT - 1:30 pm EDT July 20, 2022

Online via Zoom

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Click Register above to RSVP. Questions? Please email Allison Escoto at allison@centerforfiction.org.

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!

Not a member yet? Join today!

July Selection:
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Previous Selections:

  • Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez
  • Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
  • The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
  • Crying in H Mart by Micelle Zauner
  • The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deeshaw Philyaw
  • Zorrie by Laird Hunt
  • Matrix by Lauren Groff
  • Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
  • Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
  • The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
  • Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
  • Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
  • Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Real Life by Brandon Taylor
  • Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
  • Indelicacy by Amina Cain
  • Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
  • A Burning by Megha Majumdar
  • The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
  • Deacon King Kong by James McBride
  • 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
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Led by

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    Allison Escoto

    Head Librarian & Education Director

    Allison Escoto

    Head Librarian & Education Director

    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 reviews books for Booklist and serves on the ALA RUSA Notables committee. From 2017-2020, she was the Associate Editor for Newtown Literary Journal, a publication dedicated to featuring writers from her beloved Queens.

June Selection

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    Sea of Tranquility

    By Emily St. John Mandel

    Published by Knopf

    PURCHASE

    Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.

    Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

    When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

    A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

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.

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