OUR VENUE FOR NOVEMBER WILL BE AT KEVIN'S HOME NEAR DOWNTOWN BERKELEY, A FEW BLOCKS FROM BART.

Upcoming books and meetings:
Sunday, Nov 9, 2025: Prick Up Your Ears by John Lahr
Sunday, Dec 14, 2025: A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck
Sunday, Jan 11, 2026: Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance + Fire!! (various authors)
Sunday, Feb 8, 2026: TBD

PLEASE NOTE: If you find yourself getting bogged down in the book, please feel free to instead watch the film from 1987.

Reconstructs both the life and death of Joe Orton in a biography that was chosen Book of the Year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White when it first appeared.

"I have high hopes of dying in my prime," Joe Orton confided in his diary in July, 1967. Less than a month later, Britain's most promising comic playwright was murdered by his lover in the London flat they had shared for fifteen years.

Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his blistering comedies: Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, and What the Butler Saw.