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
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Austin: The New Yorker Weekly Short Story Readers Club
Central Market, 4001 N Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX, USWelcome to our 224th event!
We are reading the story "Narrow Escape" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The length is 7 pages. This story is published in the print edition of October 5th, 2026.
Cover photo above from our August 2024 meetup.
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
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!
23 attendees
Book-Club & Dinner Event: Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, tr: Jessica Moore
Arpeggio Grill, 6619 Airport Blvd, Austin, TX, US** SELECTED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AS 1 OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR **
** INCLUDED ON THE NEW YORKER’S BEST BOOKS OF 2023 **
“At The New York Times Book Review, I think it’s fair to say we were dazzled by the way the author creates . . . a miniature masterpiece of narrative tension and compression” – Emily Eakin, “The Book Review” podcast
In this gripping tale, a Russian conscript and a French woman cross paths on the Trans-Siberian railroad, each fleeing to the east for their own reasons
Perfect for fans of Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle and The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
Eastbound is both an adventure story and a duet of two vibrant inner worlds.
In mysterious, winding sentences gorgeously translated by Jessica Moore, De Kerangal gives us the story of two unlikely souls entwined in a quest for freedom with a striking sense of tenderness, sharply contrasting the brutality of the surrounding world.
Racing toward Vladivostok, we meet the young Aliocha, packed onto a Trans-Siberian train with other Russian conscripts. Soon after boarding, he decides to desert and over a midnight smoke in a dark corridor of the train, he encounters an older French woman, Hélène, for whom he feels an uncanny trust.
A complicity quickly grows between the two when he manages to urgently ask—through a pantomime and basic Russian that Hélène must decipher—for her help to hide him. They hurry from the filth of his third-class carriage to Hélène’s first-class sleeping car. Aliocha now a hunted deserter and Hélène his accomplice with her own inner landscape of recent memories to contend with.
Synopsis by Penguin Random House.Published by Archipelago Books
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
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