The BookEnds BookClub

Introducing The BookEnds BookClub, conversations between BookEnds mentors and fellows about the writing and revision of newly published novels, with a live audience Q&A.

We have two events coming in 2025, one featuring mentor Karen Bender with her new book The Words of Dr. L and other stories (Counterpoint Press) and the other featuring 2022 BookEnds Fellow Giano Cromley, whose BookEnds novel American Mythologies will be published by Doubleday. Information about these events coming soon!

Wednesday, April 10, 2024, 7-8 pm EST

A virtual conversation between 2021 BookEnds Fellow Nora Decter (What’s Not Mine, ECW) and her BookEnds mentor and program co-founder and co-director Susan Scarf Merrell, author of the novel Shirley, now a major motion picture starring Elizabeth Moss. 

Watch the recording of the BookClub here.

You can order What’s Not Mine here.

Nora Decter is a writer and teacher living on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her first novel, How Far We Go and How Fast, won the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Award. She loves the shapes of sentences.

Susan Scarf Merrell is the author of Shirley: A Novel, now a major motion picture starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg. She is also the author of A Member of the Family, and The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She co-directs the Southampton Writers Conference, is program director (along with Meg Wolitzer) of the novel incubator program, BookEnds, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton.

Wednesday, May 22, 2024, 7-8 pm EST

A virtual conversation between BookEnds mentor Eve Gleichman (Trust & Safety, Dutton) with their co-author Laura Blackett and BookEnds program co-founder and co-director Meg Wolitzer, whose novels include The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among others.

Watch the BookClub here.

Order copies of Trust & Safety here.

Eve Gleichman and Laura Blackett are writing partners in Brooklyn. They met ten years ago as neighbors in the same apartment building, and soon after began collaborating on their debut novel, The Very Nice Box, which became a New York Times Editor’s Choice and an Apple Book of the Month. 

Meg Wolitzer’s novels include The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among others. Wolitzer, who has also written books for young readers, was guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017.  She is host of the literary radio show and podcast Selected Shorts.

Wednesday, September 11, 2024, 7-8 pm EST

A virtual conversation between 2022 BookEnds Fellow Joselyn Takacs (Pearce Oysters, Zibby Books) with her BookEnds mentor and program co-founder and co-director Meg Wolitzer, whose novels include The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among others.

Watch the BookClub  here.

Order copies of Pearce Oysters here.

Joselyn Takacs holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Her fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative, Tin House online, Harvard Review, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and elsewhere. She has published interviews and book reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy. 

Her debut novel, Pearce Oysters, a family drama set during the 2010 BP Oil Spill, is forthcoming from Zibby Books in the summer of 2024. She lived in New Orleans at the time of the spill, and in 2015, she received a grant to record the oral histories of Louisiana oyster farmers in the wake of the environmental disaster. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

Meg Wolitzer’s novels include The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among others. Wolitzer, who has also written books for young readers, was guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017.  She is host of the literary radio show and podcast Selected Shorts.