Reading Groups

Members Only: The Literarians

Free

RSVP Below

Wednesday, 12:30 pm EST - 2:00 pm EST March 17, 2021

Online via Zoom

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:
Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Previous Selections:

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

Led by

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.

Up Next

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Real Life

By Brandon Taylor

Published by Riverhead

PURCHASE

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.

Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.

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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