What we’re about
Attention authors: someone is pretending to be the organizer of this group and contacting authors by email to offer some kind of collaboration. We don't have anything like that. They are trying to steal money from you.
We are a book club meeting in Williamsburg and Greenpoint with a mix of longtime members and brand new folks each month. You are warmly invited to join us.
Our books are decided by monthly vote, and can be of any genre. After reading, we'll get together on the second Wednesday of the month at a local Williamsburg bar to discuss. The discussion is causal and unpretentious and you are welcome to participate to whatever extent you prefer.
Please check out our sister clubs as well
Brooklyn Comics Club
Brooklyn Movie Club
Upcoming events (1)
See all- Ghosts by Edith Wharton (NYRB Classics)Kent Ale House, Brooklyn, NYUSD 1.00
For October we're giving ourselves a good scare and reading Ghosts by Edith Wharton (NYRB Classics, 288 pgs). Hope to see you then!
About the book:
No history of the American uncanny tale would be complete without mention of Edith Wharton, yet many of Wharton’s most dedicated admirers are unaware that she was a master of the form. In fact, one of Wharton’s final literary acts was assembling Ghosts, a personal selection of her most chilling stories, written between 1902 and 1937.
In “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” the earliest tale included here, a servant’s dedication to her mistress continues from beyond the grave, and in “All Souls,” the last story Wharton wrote, an elderly woman treads the permeable line between life and the hereafter. In all her writing, Wharton’s great gift was to mercilessly illuminate the motives of men and women, and her ghost stories never stray far from the preoccupations of the living, using the supernatural to investigate such worldly matters as violence within marriage, the horrors of aging, the rot at the root of new fortunes, the darkness that stares back from the abyss of one’s own soul. These are stories to “send a cold shiver down one’s spine,” not to terrify, and as Wharton explains in her preface, her goal in writing them was to counter “the hard grind of modern speeding-up” by preserving that ineffable space of “silence and continuity,” which is not merely the prerogative of humanity but—“in the fun of the shudder”—its delight.Because Meetup charges organizers like me $389.76 annually, there is a $1 suggested donation. If you'd like to contribute, you can do so at the meetup or by venmo (I'll post the info afterwards).
