Austin: The New Yorker Magazine Short Story Readers Club

Calling all literary fiction lovers of the greater Austin Area for our 164th event!

We are reading the story "The Welfare State" by Nell Zink. Link is provided in the comments section below and will be visible once you sign up for the event.

IMPORTANT NOTE: We will be starting our discussion at 7:45pm.

We also would like everyone to please RSVP if you plan to attend and update it if your plans change promptly. This is critical for our event planning purposes. We very much appreciate it.

Our Discord Server: join our community to chat and hang in between meetups! You will also find our story under discussion posted there each week.

KUT's Sean Saldana, a member of our meetup, recently did a story about us: read here!

Interested in being a part of meaningful conversations on life, love, and contemporary short fiction? Are you a bookish type that loves to keep up with The New Yorker's short story of the week? Miss reading and having friends who read, but don't have the time to linger over a 300-page novel?

Welcome: We have been searching for y'all and would be pleased to co-create a fun lil literary community together! Come join our group weekly for a lively, thoughtful in-person discussion of the latest and greatest work of short fiction from The New Yorker.

Whether you're a longtime lover of literature or just curious to see what all the fuss is about when it comes to Murakami and pals, we’d love to have you either way; reading, like most everything else in life, is just more fun with friends!

Please note that this is an inclusive community space, welcoming of LGBTQIA+, queer, transgender, and nonbinary people. Event attendees will be asked to share their preferred pronouns and to respect the preferred pronouns shared by other discussion participants.

People of color seeking a diverse community and reading selection are also especially encouraged to attend. Not that they're perfect (or that we are, for that matter), but part of the reason why we read The New Yorker's short stories is that the editorial staff has done a good job in recent years of publishing writers of color and promoting, more generally, a wide-ranging selection of American & international literary voices. Our reading group is also fairly diverse in terms of ethnic and cultural background.

We are reading "Pale Fire" by Vladimir Nabokov.
Available at First Light Books 4300 Speedway, Austin

Nabokov on writing Pale Fire:

"As to Pale Fire, although I had devised some odds and ends of Zemblan lore in the late fifties in Ithaca, New York, I felt the first real pang of the novel, a rather complete vision of its structure in miniature, and jotted it down—I have it in one of my pocket diaries—while sailing from New York to France in 1959. The American poem discussed in the book by His Majesty, Charles of Zembla, was the hardest stuff I ever had to compose. Most of it I wrote in Nice, in winter, walking along the Promenade des Anglais or rambling in the neighboring hills. A good deal of Kinbote’s commentary was written here in the Montreux Palace garden, one of the most enchanting and inspiring gardens I know.* I’m especially fond of its weeping cedar, the arboreal counterpart of a very shaggy dog with hair hanging over its eyes."

Book synopsis from the Penguin Random House:

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary figure.

An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, this darkly witty novel of suspense, literary one-upmanship, and political intrigue achieves that rarest of things in literature–perfect tragicomic balance.

Book link from the Publisher


Meetup Structure:
We will meet at Arpeggio Restaurant to discuss the book over dinner. We are expected to order food and drinks at the venue. After Introductions, we will have an open discussion on the book. Multiple copiess of the book are available at Austin Public Library.