The Center for Fiction

06/07/2026

Our Bookstore column this week celebrates the beginning of the summer season with five novels that explore the meaning of life. The characters within each seek answers to life’s unending puzzles, armed with heart, wit, intellect, and fierce curiosity. Learn more about them here https://tinyurl.com/42y75wa4!

📖 Villa Coco (Doubleday Books) by Andrew Sean Greer: A “delightful farce.”

📖 Ghost-Eye (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Amitav Ghosh: “Ghosh’s story fluidly combines spirituality with environmental activism.” Join Ghosh and author Ravi Agrawal at our event this Thursday, June 11th! https://tinyurl.com/7jfynzcs

📖 Contrapposto (Alfred A. Knopf) by Dave Eggers: “A charmingly complex love letter to art, beauty and the passion it provokes that affects each person in its own way.”

📖 Dooneen (New Directions) by Keith Ridgway: “A dizzyingly clever, though disturbing, novel that is hard to put down.” Don’t miss Ridgway at our annual ALL PRIDE, NO PREJUDICE! A Literary LGBTQ+ Celebration on Wednesday, June 17th! https://tinyurl.com/mpc36am4

📖 Rabbit, Fox, Tar (Catapult) by P. C. Verrone: “Peronne mixes racial politics with African folklore in a captivating novel.”

06/05/2026

In “The Hofmann Wobble,” Ben Lerner explores the slippage between life and art—as well as truth and fiction—with an eye toward the construction of digital avatars and facts alike.

As with most of Lerner’s writing, the main structural points of the story are drawn from fact, but the details are fiction. Perhaps the “truest” part of the narrative is the concluding conversation between the author and ChatGPT, in which Lerner implicates and names both himself and the nature of his project.

Discuss this mind-bending story with us online this summer. Register at the link below!

Online | Explore the slippage between life and art, truth and fiction, in this AI-inflected autofiction—and consider what its wobbling realities, digital avatars, and human-machine collaborations reveal about truth and ethics.

06/03/2026

Ann Patchett stopped by The Center to sign copies of her new novel, WHISTLER (HarperCollins)📚. https://tinyurl.com/mwpccn8d

Get yours while you can—and keep an eye out for the CFF cameos toward the middle and end of the book!

06/02/2026

Summer writing workshops are coming in hot! Super-charge your writing in June in one of our upcoming courses:

📓 (6.22 – 7.27 | Online) 300 WORDS A DAY with Pablo Ottonello: Keep your writing practice active even when life gets chaotic by starting a literary diary. You’ll learn how to transform seemingly random thoughts into compelling narratives that resonate with readers by exploring the work and musings of Franz Kafka, John Cheever, Sei Shōnagon, Susan Sontag, May Sarton, Sarah Manguso, Vivian Gornick, and more. https://tinyurl.com/37vsw8e9

📓 (6.24 – 7.15 | In person at CFF) MEMOIR 101 with Rax King: New to personal writing? Self-conscious about “navel-gazing”? Together, we’ll read excerpts from memoirs by writers including Mary Karr, Samantha Irby, and Tony Tulathimutte; discuss the craft peculiarities of personal and confessional writing; and do generative exercises to jumpstart your own projects. https://tinyurl.com/25fupfk5

📓 (6.25 – 8.13 | Online) ADVANCED SHORT STORY WORKSHOP with Amy Silverberg: This course provides a supportive space to polish or complete at least 2 works of short or flash fiction. Sessions will include peer critiques; close readings of published stories by authors including Ling Ma, Mary Gaitskill, Danielle Evans, Aimee Bender, Charles Yu, and Lauren Groff; and a discussion about submitting work for publication, getting an agent, selling a book, and other aspects of “the writer’s life.” https://tinyurl.com/3fxyd8mk

05/30/2026

Unusual friendships; toxic friendships; dangerous friendships that lead to murder. A family living in the aftermath of the Irish Famine, and an investigation of a famous American expat in Paris.

Melanie Fleishman’s recommendations this week feature a cast of characters as unique as they are memorable, their dynamics brought to life by astoundingly talented authors. Read her reviews in this week's Bookstore newsletter: https://tinyurl.com/4vt5mxs2.

05/29/2026

🌈 Get ready for the ultimate literary Pride celebration—our fifth annual All Pride, No Prejudice, hosted this year by writers and SNL alumni Auguste White and Celeste Yim! Join us as we come together in joy and affirmation to hear from some of today’s most creative voices in q***r literature. https://tinyurl.com/mpc36am4 🪩

This year’s featured authors are:
📖 Natalie Adler (Waiting on a Friend)
📖 Samantha Allen (Puck)
📖 Nicholas Boggs (Baldwin: A Love Story)
📖 Julián Delgado Lopera (Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You)
📖 John Glynn (The Lost Book of Lancelot)
📖 Jessica Handler (The World To See)
📖 Clarence A. Haynes (The Broken Hearts Agency)
📖 Roya Marsh (savings time)
📖 Rasheed Newson (There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood)
📖 Keith Ridgway (Dooneen)
📖 Paul Rudnick (The Tuxedo Society)

Whether you’re a lifelong reader looking to discover new books, a longtime fan of the featured authors, or someone in search of q***r joy, this is the can’t-miss literary party of the season!

Presented with support from Brooklyn Org.

05/27/2026

It was hard to miss the crowd’s deep appreciation for Jeff Boyd at the launch of his new novel, HARD TIMES (Flatiron Books). We can’t thank Xochitl Gonzalez enough for asking such great questions about the array of character perspectives, nuanced authority dynamics, class tensions, and sense of place in Boyd’s writing. Swipe through for a glimpse of the evening—and purchase your copy at CFF's bookstore! https://tinyurl.com/yevzyztk 📸

05/26/2026

Indigenous people have shared and recorded their stories and histories for centuries—long before the first Europeans set foot on Turtle Island.

📚 Join us for an exploration of these narratives in a conversation moderated by scholar Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation), featuring novelists Eliana Ramage (Cherokee Nation) and Greg Sarris (Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria), along with historian Linford D. Fisher. The panel will bring together:

𖧹 Fisher's rich account of the long history of Indigenous enslavement and land dispossession

𖧹 Ramage's and Sarris's fictional depictions of an aspiring Cherokee astronaut, and a Depression-era shape-shifter, respectively, and

𖧹 Pierce's theorization of future worlds and imaginaries that illuminate Indigenous thought and practice

Get your tickets https://tinyurl.com/2kvb6vw8!

05/24/2026

If you’re a member of The Center or a newsletter subscriber, you’ve already gotten a first look at our summer reading group season. It’s especially rich with In Shorts—our one-night-only discussions of essential short works—like our winter session on Joan Didion’s The White Album led by Meredith Mann, the Interim Charles J. Liebman Curator of Manuscripts at New York Public Library Research.

After the group met, Mann invited participants to explore the archives, which have everything from dinner party menus, interview transcriptions, and annotated screenplays, to journals, letters to and from friends and colleagues, photographs, and more, spanning Didion’s tremendous career.

Members of the public with a library card can also explore the collection by making an appointment at [email protected]. Until then, swipe for a sneak peek!

05/23/2026

📚 The theme of Melanie Fleishman's Bookstore column this week: Strangers in Strange Lands.

A noted humorist is continually awed by his journeys; a Chinese American novelist explores how previous generations of his family viewed the world; a writer uses a (very) late pregnancy to explore female autonomy in our current world; and a Bulgarian author is transplanted to New York. You will also find a selection of excellent essays from an award-winning writer.

Read Melanie's reviews in full here https://tinyurl.com/4ecszhmu!