About us
Hello and welcome to The New Yorker Short Story Readers Club in Austin! We read short-stories published in The New Yorker magazine. Each week we pick up a recent issue of the magazine to pick a short-story for our meetup discussion.
The New Yorker magazine also provides an audio version of the text usually rendered by the author in their weekly podcast - Writer's Voice. We post the link to the audio version for our participants.
We are a fairly diverse community of readers and our members come from various ethnic, cultural and racial backgrounds. Our meetup group is an inclusive space and we wholeheartedly welcome LGBTQIA+ folks and Allies.
The New Yorker magazine's short fiction represents voices from all around the globe. By engaging with these texts, we seek to elevate our own thoughts and ideas on life's Big Questions and reflect on the meaning of being human.
We hope you get to join us in one of our meetup events soon!
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Cover photo by Le Travelling Fork: A Food and Travel Journal by K.
Cover illustrations by Diobelle Cerna and Tabitha Brown
Upcoming events
2
Austin: The New Yorker Weekly Short Story Readers Club
Central Market, 4001 N Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX, USWelcome to our 205th event!
We are reading the story "The Readers" by Ben Lerner. The length is 12 pages. This story is published in the print edition of June 29th, 2026.
Link is provided in the comments section below and will be visible once you sign up for the event.
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.
Meetup structure:
7:00pm -- 7:45pm: Socializing and/or catch up on the reading for the meetup7:45pm -- 8:00pm: Introductions and presentation of summary of the text
8:00pm -- 8:50pm: Discussion on the short-story
8:50pm -- 9:00pm: Voting on the short-story and Goodbyes
We plan to go to Hopfields (3110 Guadalupe St.) afterwards to celebrate our 200th meetup! Please join us!
Please note that we are an inclusive space that welcome folks from diverse backgrounds and we wholeheartedly welcome and support LGBTQIA+, nonbinary members and Allies. We are always striving to reach out and embrace diverse voices within our Austin community. We hope you get to join our event!
WaitList explanation: Meetup.com's engine schedules and adds folks in the waitlist automatically. Folks with higher-tier memberships are prioritized by the Meetup system. As organizers, we don't have a say in it and we don't change the order in which the people are waitlisted.
KUT's Sean Saldana, a member of our meetup, recently did a story about us: read here!
16 attendees
Book-Club & Dinner Event: The Imaginary Age by Leanna Petronella
Arpeggio Grill, 6619 Airport Blvd, Austin, TX, USWe are reading the award-winning collection of poetry by Leonna Petronella who is also a longtime member of our meetup!
Available online at LSU PressThe author will be in attendance!
"This is a book of transport that turns the imagination into a bathysphere, a spacecraft, a carousel. Petronella is not afraid to examine matters of sex, blood, private calamity with bold wit and verve. And while a whimsical intellect drives these poems through childhood closets and vivid menageries, the reader notes the signs of peril littering such a landscape: “unsepulchered girlish legs,” “wasps and teeth,” “pieces of beak.” Come ride this exquisite vessel of The Imaginary Age, whose shadows leave a strange calligraphy on the ground."--—Carolina Ebeid, author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior
Leanna Petronella is a poet and writer whose works have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Third Coast, Birmingham Poetry Review, Drunken Boat, and Brevity. She holds a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri, where she was poetry editor for the Missouri Review, and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Austin.
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.10 attendees
Past events
204
Group links
Members
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