Category Archives: BookEnds Book Club

Spring News Round-Up

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Following the publication of several novels last year, 2024 sees the publication of two BookEnds novels: Nora Decter’s What’s Not Mine (ECW) was published earlier this month, and you can watch the BookEnds BookClub featuring Nora in conversation with her mentor and program co-founding director Susan Scarf Merrell here. Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby Books) is available for preorder now. Joselyn’s novel will be featured at the BookEnds BookClub in September, in conversation with her mentor and other program co-founding director, Meg Wolitzer.

We are proud to announce that 2022 Fellow Giano Cromley’s BookEnds novel American Mythology is forthcoming with Doubleday, Summer 2025! Several Fellows from our recent and incoming cohorts have also signed with agents this spring. 

BookEnds alums are also busy and active in their community, with new works in progress; supporting one another through daily and weekly Zoom writing sessions; giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process; and—of course—through our BookEnds blog. Check out this recent post from 2023 Fellow Suzanne LaFetra Collier on serving as a BookEnds selection committee reader.  

We’re also delighted to remind everyone to check out program co-director Meg as the host of Selected Shorts! 

We look forward to bringing you more great news soon. To learn more about BookEnds, check out our Fall 2023 Open House!

The Thrill of the Unreliable: On Vanessa Cuti’s THE TIP LINE

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In advance of our BookEnds BookClub on Wednesday, May 24, featuring program alum Vanessa Cuti and her debut novel The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, 2023) in conversation with her cohort member Alison Fairbrother (author of The Catch, Random House, 2022), alum Nora Decter looks at Vanessa’s masterful narration. 

All first-person narrators are unreliable, I tell my students every semester, as the writing teachers of yore once told me. It’s a literary foregone conclusion: no one who tells their own story can be trusted. 

Still, it’s a quality I don’t think we laud enough in fiction, this unreliability, perhaps because it’s so universally human a trait we don’t recognize the skill involved in getting it on the page. 

Vanessa Cuti’s debut novel The Tip Line offers readers a daring example of the flexibility of first-person, calling to mind psychological thrillers heavy on the literary gravitas like Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen or Death in Her Hands, whose first-person narrators are richly weird, the stories they tell all the more riveting for that weirdness. Maybe it was The Tip Line’s seaside setting, but I was also reminded of Ann Quin’s Berg, the so-called “working class Virginia Woolf”—something about the particular dark pitch Quin and Cuti give their subject matter. 

All of this to say that with The Tip Line, Cuti has given us the elements of a crime thriller (murdered sex workers, shady cops), added a marriage plot, and then filtered it through a consciousness that genuinely confounds expectations. At thirty years old, our first-person narrator Virginia Carey is unmarried and unemployed, a little behind on her life plan, as her mother would say. When she accepts a job at the local police headquarters, it seems she’s found a solution to both problems. But it’s not the conventional admin job Virginia expected—instead she’s answering a tip line, fielding calls mostly from people accusing their neighbors of being drug lords. Nor is it really a conventional place to find a husband, at least not the way Virginia goes about it. But the setting suits her nature: composed on the surface, with something secret brewing underneath. “Honestly,” she says, early in the book, “I only wanted to stop looking. I could not understand why it was so hard. And so, here we are. The police department.”

In another early passage Cuti gives us a key to understanding Virginia’s motives. Over several pages, Virginia explains her relationship history, how she ended up unmarried at thirty, concluding, “I was always trying to find that little place of darkness in a man. So that when we were quiet, lying in bed, just before or just after, our little darknesses matched up.” 

Virginia’s internal monologue is delivered in a frank, terse tone and we are brought deep into her daydreams, as she fantasizes first about Charlie, a detective, and then later Declan Brady, the chief of police. These fantasies fool us until we adjust to the frequency with which Virginia slips into them. “Not yet. Keep going,” she tells herself after spinning out a scene in her head between her and Charlie. “There were dozens of these,” she says, “These were just a few.”

Virginia is reliable in her unreliability, which is embodied by the increasingly questionable decisions she makes as the plot of the novel progresses. This is especially apparent in her dealings with Verona, the tip line caller who leads police to the bodies of the murdered women on the beach. Verona almost seems a shadow version of Virginia at the other end of the phone. They have in common their relative youth, beauty and the power found in that. But it’s Verona, a sex worker, who is honest, and Virginia who can’t really be trusted. In a remarkably written sequence of scenes, Virginia’s attention shifts from Charlie, the detective she is on the cusp of courting, to Brady, the police chief. Soon Virginia begins to suspect the killer Verona is describing sounds a lot like Brady, and she is drawn even closer to him. Readers remember the earlier passage about wanting a man whose dark spots matched her own. “Those spots—ticking constantly like quartz within us—would be carefully contained, encapsulated, by all the rest of the virtue surrounding them. We were normal people, good people, and we would keep each other’s dark spots from growing, from taking over. This is what relationships were for. What marriages were for.”

Neither the narrative nor Virginia are reliably what they seem. Yes, there are murdered sex workers, but the mystery of who kills them, like the real life Gilgo beach serial murders that inspired the plot, remains unsolved by the book’s end. Yes, Virginia wants a husband, but not for the conventional reasons her friends and family want her to find one. 

But for writers, The Tip Line offers a master class in unreliable narration. The way Cuti writes Virginia is, in the end, even more thrilling than the love affair or the dead girls on the beach. 

Nora Decter is a writer and teacher from Winnipeg, Canada. She has an MFA in creative writing from Stony Brook University and she was a BookEnds fellow in 2020-2021. Her BookEnds novel What’s Not Mine is forthcoming from ECW Press in April 2024.

Girls with Feelings: On Daisy Alpert Florin’s MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR 

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In advance of our BookEnds BookClub on Wednesday, April 5, featuring program alum Daisy Alpert Florin and her debut novel MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR (Holt, 2023) in conversation with her BookEnds mentor and co-founding director Susan Scarf Merrell, alum Rachel León considers the validation of reviews and the power of opening lines.

For many writers, to have our work raved about in The New York Times is a landmark feat, a universally-recognized indication of success. The BookEnds community was thrilled to see alum Daisy Alpert Florin’s debut novel My Last Innocent Year receive such laudatory coverage from reviewer Elisabeth Egan, who writes “My Last Innocent Year is a heartfelt chronicle of a writer who realizes that her stories about girls with feelings matter every bit as much as the ones written by the guy who annotates The New Yorker.” 

My Last Innocent Year centers the protagonist, Isabel Rosen, during her final semester at a prestigious East Coast college as she falls into a relationship with her professor. Set in the late 90s against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, it’s atmospheric and beautiful, a smart and masterfully written novel that examines consent, the cost of our mistakes, and how we reckon with our past.

Egan points out how richly layered My Last Innocent Year is—the multiple threads that are woven throughout the story. And while, yes, the story itself is meticulously plotted, one of the things not noted is the attention to detail on the line level, attention we see from the novel’s very first line: 

“It’s hard to say how I ended up in Zev Neman’s dorm room the night before winter break.”

This sentence does so much work. It establishes Isabel as the kind of conscientious narrator who wants to get this story right, yet admits the fallibility of her account. This is not a narrator who will manipulate the reader. She won’t lie or stretch the truth. But Isabel is relying on her memory to share her account, and memory is inherently flawed. 

The first line also sets up the opening scene, in which the facts of the events can be debated by readers. It’s clearly a nonconsensual sexual encounter; does that mean it’s rape? Zev could be described as a friend; can one be assaulted by a friend? The temporal distance from which Isabel narrates this story forces the reader to consider the limitations of how our culture talked about sexual assault and consent twenty-five years ago, and continues to debate it today. We live in a culture that still blames women victims of sexual assault for “asking for it” if they are wearing clothes that are tight or revealing, if they drink heavily around men, or if they go to a man’s bedroom, as Isabel does. So this one sentence situates the novel’s themes, from the very first line. 

From there the novel builds to a crescendo. My Last Innocent Year has gotten a lot of buzz for being a literary page-turner that prompts important cultural conversations. Its themes and smart craft choices make it a perfect book club novel, and The BookEnds Book Club event on April 5th one not to miss. 

But what ultimately makes My Last Innocent Year such an incredible success isn’t as easily measured. As Daisy told me in a mini-interview on my Substack, she wrote the book she wanted to read. She didn’t rush, she took the time she needed to write this remarkable novel. And in the end, that’s the greatest success we should all hope to achieve.  

Rachel León is a writer, editor, and social worker. She serves as Daily Editor for Chicago Review of Books. Her work has appeared in Catapult, BOMB Magazine, The Millions, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. 

Spring News Round-Up: New Novels, Acclaim, and the BookEnds BookClub!

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The past months have seen the publication of several BookEnds novels to great acclaim: Alison Fairbrother’s The Catch (Random House), which was Selected as an Editors’ Choice in the New York Times and a Best New Book of the Week at People Magazine; Sue Mell’s Provenance (Madville), winner of the Blue Moon Novel Award, a 2022 Great Group Read Selection by the Women’s National Book Association, and a 2022 Best Indie Fiction Pick by the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses [clmp]; Coco Picard’s The Healing Circle (Red Hen Press); and most recently, Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year (Holt, 2023), a New York Times’ Editors’ Choice Selection, as well as the subject of the Times’ Group Text Discussion in February 2023. 

We are proud to announce these forthcoming novels from our BookEnds Fellows!

  • Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, April 18, 2023)
  • Nora Decter’s What’s Not Mine (ECW, April 2024)
  • Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby, Summer 2024)

We are also thrilled to announce the launch of the BookEnds BookClub!

  • Check out our inaugural event featuring Paul Harding and Caitlin Mullen, in conversation about Paul’s This Other Eden (Norton, 2023).
  • Daisy Alpert Florin will be in conversation with her BookEnds mentor and program co-director Susan Scarf Merrell on April 5 for our BookEnds BookClub. You can order signed copies of both Daisy’s and Susie’s books by the event date by following the link on our BookClub page. 
  • Vanessa Cuti will be in conversation with her BookEnds cohort member Alison Fairbrother on May 24 for our BookEnds BookClub. You can order signed copies of both Vanessa’s and Alison’s books by the event date by following the link on our BookClub page.

BookEnders are also busy with new works in progress, supporting one another through daily and weekly Zoom writing sessions, the alumni meetings and author events, and giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process, and—of course—through our BookEnds blog. 

We look forward to bringing you more great news soon!

Close Reading: Paul Harding’s THIS OTHER EDEN

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In anticipation of the inaugural BookEnds Book Club on Wednesday, March 1, alum  J. Greg Phelan offers a close reading of a passage from program mentor Paul Harding’s This Other Eden. For a link to this virtual event, and to order signed copies of books from our authors in conversation, visit the BookEnds website here!

One of the best parts of working with Paul Harding during my BookEnds fellowship was gaining insight into his writing process. During a recent interview, I had the privilege to once again prod him to reveal his secrets––to ask him how he renders the complex states of being that propel his stories with such clarity and concreteness, in so few words. “I’m fascinated,” he told me, “by how much meaning you can get into a given sentence without being exhausting, exhaustive, or ponderous. To make the book 220 pages long but feel 1200 pages deep.”

Paul provides a master’s class on how to do just that in his extraordinary new novel, This Other Eden, which evokes the breadth and depth of a much longer book. 

Take this passage of a sixteen-year-old maid removing sheets from clotheslines. Describing this everyday chore, Paul effortlessly weaves Bridget’s past, present, and future to precisely render the rich, complex interplay between what she does, perceives, thinks, and feels. Looking closely, we can consider the range of his mastery in a single, nearly page-long paragraph, which he starts boldly with a sentence fragment: 

Bridget in the lowering light, unclipping the sheets from the lines. 

The sole verb––unclipping––connotes an eternal present, as if we are observing Bridget unclipping the sheets both now and forever, if she’d been captured in a painting. It’s a dazzling effect Paul employs throughout the novel. The paragraph continues: 

The lines spring back when taut when she pulls the sheets from them, like the plucked strings on the homemade driftwood fiddles her father and uncles played at night. 

The present tense action pulls recalls the past tense activity played as we drift along with Bridget’s thoughts, mirroring how the mind works, gliding from the activity at hand to impressions of the past.  

She walked along the water with her father, looking for good pieces of wood. He traced the outline of a neighbor’s fiddle on a sheet of paper in charcoal, like Ethan drawing in the meadow.

Ethan is the boy she admires; as we start to intuit, her feelings about him confuse her. Indeed, she’s not yet ready to fully consider him, so we linger in the past:

Her father worked on the fiddle all one winter, when there wasn’t much to do and it was dark most of the time and the wind moaned and fog covered the island and the fairies moaned and wailed out in the dark and knew death, too. 

Did you catch how by grounding us in the concrete detail of the natural world (darkness, wind, and fog) Paul seamlessly carries us into a supernatural world of moaning and wailing fairies? His transition is so smooth, we don’t question but feel. All to prepare us, at last, to drift back to the boy circling her thoughts. 

There is something about that Ethan, with his charcoal and sunburned face and neck, something about him she can’t put a name to.

This sentence warmly and efficiently dramatizes the fact that Bridget’s confused feelings regarding the boy both compel and frighten her. This is the quiet conflict Paul so deftly dramatizes through these successive moments: Bridget is trying to keep a lid on her budding sexuality. In a vain attempt to do so, she returns to the task at hand: 

The sheets are so clean and stiff and crunch when she folds them and places them in the basket. 

A concrete, simple description in the here and now, gently invoking her innocence. These plain and powerful details juxtapose with her stream of thoughts and feelings to provide what it might otherwise take pages to convey. Then we return to her inner world, transported by the following wondrous, long and winding sentence without any commas, a marvel really how Paul moves so subtly from the present to her imagined future:

One sheet is her own and she will put it on her narrow bed in her small clean room tonight before lying down to sleep and it will feel crisp and clean and smell clean and good in the heat and she will open a window to let the fresh air in and it will feel so good and she will miss her mother and her dad and her sisters and her brothers so much that the comforts of the sheets and open window and lonesomeness of missing her family will make her cry herself to a dreamless sleep. 

This sentence accretes in a tumult of emotion she feels and knows she will feel. Staving off these increasingly strong, disconcerting feelings, Bridget once again retreats to the task at hand:

She reaches the sheet on the last line and discovers that the side facing the open meadow is covered with flecks of hay and dust from the mowing. Foolish girl, she thinks. You should’ve known such a thing would happen today. Scolding herself comforts her because she hears her mother’s voice when she does. She hears her mother’s voice and she tries to see if she can shake out the sheet by taking it in from the bottom and stepping back and drawing it out and snapping it so the hay will come off. She begins to sing. 

Swift, decisive action and thought has brought us here to the paragraph’s conclusion, in which Bridget being moved to express her feelings by singing.

Throughout the book, Paul painstakingly renders human complexity in countless moments just like these––living, breathing paintings in prose––to construct this powerhouse novel.

J. Greg Phelan was a BookEnds Fellow in 2018-2019 and has an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. His articles, reviews, and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Millions, and America magazine. He’s the co-founder and board chair of Project Write Now, a writing center providing classes and outreach for all ages. In 2020, he launched  book inc., a writing community for memoir and novel writers. 

Fall News Round-Up: Forthcoming BookEnds Novels and More!

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This past summer saw the publication of three BookEnds novels: Alison Fairbrother’s The Catch (Random House), which was Selected as an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times and a Best New Book of the Week at People Magazine; Sue Mell’s Provenance (Madville Publishing), winner of the Blue Moon Novel Award and just selected as a 2022 Great Group Read by the Women’s National Book Association; and Coco Picard’s The Healing Circle (Red Hen Press), recipient of The Women’s Prose Award. 

We are proud to announce these forthcoming novels from our BookEnds Fellows: 

  • Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year (Holt, February 14, 2023)
  • Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, April 18, 2023)
  • Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby Owens, 2024)

Our alumni and fellows are actively publishing stories, essays, book reviews and author interviews—and as BookEnds novels are published, they are writing about one another’s work and interviewing each other! BookEnders are also busy with new works in progress, supporting one another through Zoom writing sessions, the alums monthly meetings and author events, giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process, and through our BookEnds blog. This vibrant, supportive community extends to our Alumni Group and Visiting Writers Series, which hosts talks this fall with Matt Bell, Courtney Maum, and Peter Ho Davies. 

Finally, we are thrilled to announce that 2023 will bring The Lichtenstein Center Presents: The BookEnds Book Club! The first events will discuss This Other Eden, by longtime BookEnds mentor and MFA director Paul Harding, in conversation with his BookEnds mentee and Edgar Award-winning novelist Caitlin Mullen; My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin, in conversation with her mentor and program co-founder and director Susan Merrell; and The Tip Line by Vanessa Cuti, in conversation with her BookEnds podmate from the first year of the program, Alison Fairbrother.