Meetings are led by Patrick Brownson and Michael Sevy. They take place every Tuesday at 6:30 PM ET for 90 minutes via Zoom (email [email protected] for Zoom link). Each week we discuss the assigned reading (see breakdown below) with participation voluntary. Attendees are asked to mute when not speaking and raise their hand to be called on by the leader.
Weekly Page Breakdown
Intro to the French New Novel
The French New Novel as exemplified by these 3 short novels was not a school or movement but a further exploration of the novel in its use of language and its portrayals of relationships between people and the objects that surround them. Taking off from the reinvention of the novel from Flaubert, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and especially, Beckett, each of these authors brings something new to the reading experience. There are nods to traditional forms, the detective story, the romance, but with an emphasis on objectivity and voyeurism. Lovers of French New Wave cinema would feel at home with these authors.
Alain Robbe-Grillet The Erasers Grove Press
March 17, 2026 page 1 – 90
March 24, 2026 page 93 – 169
March 31, 2026 page 173 – end
other editions
March 17, 2026 Prologue – Chapter 1
March 24, 2026 Chapter 2 – Chapter 3
March 31, 2026 Chapter 4 – end
Marguerite Duras The Ravishing of Lol Stein Grove Press
April 7, 2026 page 1 – 78
April 14, 2026 page 79 – end
other editions:
April 7, 2026 start – “not to accept Lol’s invitation this first time.”
April 14, 2026 “John Bedford has retired” – end
Nathalie Sarraute Tropisms New Directions
April 21, 2026 entire book
Amis: father and son
Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim NYRB
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers back in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.
May 5, 2026 page 1 – 79
May 12, 2026 page 80 – 158
May 19, 2026 page 159 – end
other editions:
May 5, 2026 Chapter 1 – chapter 7
May 12, 2026 Chapter 8 – chapter 15
May 19, 2026 Chapter 16 – end
Martin Amis Money A Suicide Note Vintage
Time Magazine included the book in its list of the 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. The story of John Self and his insatiable appetite for money, alcohol, fast food, drugs, pornography, and more, Money is ceaselessly inventive and thrillingly savage; a tale of life lived without restraint, of money and the disasters it can precipitate.
May 26, 2026 page 1 – 77
June 2, 2026 page 77 – 168
June 9, 2026 page 169 – 252
June 16, 2026 page 252 – 317
June 23, 2026 page 318 – 391
June 30, 2026 page 392 – end
other editions:
May 26, 2026 start – “shut up safe for the night, far from my touch.”
June 2, 2026 “Something is missing from the present” – “Look around! Of course She is.”
June 9, 2026 “Above the entrance to the saloon” – “to be back in civilization again.”
June 16, 2026 “I want to thank you, John” – “It’ll all turn out right in the end.”
June 23, 2026 “At this moment in time” – “she’s all too human in the end.”
June 30, 2026 “And one, and two, and three” – end
Maugham and Kazantzakis
W Somerset Maugham The Razor’s Edge Vintage International
Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham’s most brilliant characters – his fiancee Isabel, whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliot Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob. The most ambitious of Maugham’s novels, this is also one in which Maugham himself plays a considerable part as he wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters struggling with their fates.
July 14, 2026 page 1 – 51
July 21, 2026 page 55 – 94
July 28, 2026 page 97 – 184
August 4, 2026 page 187 – 239
August 11, 2026 page 243 – end
other editions:
July 14, 2026 Part 1
July 21, 2026 Part 2
July 28, 2026 Part 3 – part 4
August 4, 2026 Part 5
August 11, 2026 Part 6 – end
Nikos Kazantzakis Zorba the Greek Simon & Schuster
First published in 1946, Zorba the Greek, is, on one hand, the story of a Greek working man named Zorba, a passionate lover of life, the unnamed narrator who he accompanies to Crete to work in a lignite mine, and the men and women of the town where they settle. On the other hand it is the story of God and man, The Devil and the Saints; the struggle of men to find their souls and purpose in life and it is about love, courage and faith.
August 18, 2026 page 1 – 69
August 25, 2026 page 70 – 132
September 1, 2026 page 133 – 201
September 8, 2026 page 202 – 270
September 15, 2026 page 271 – end
other editions:
August 18, 2026 Prologue – chapter IV
August 25, 2026 Chapter V – chapter IX
September 1, 2026 Chapter X – chapter XV
September 8, 2026 Chapter XVI – chapter XXI
September 15, 2026 Chapter XXII – end
Mircea Cărtărescu Solenoid Deep Vellum Publishing
Based on Cărtărescu’s own experience as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist’s life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. The novel is grounded in the reality of Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life, while on a broad scale Solenoid‘s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines attempt to reconcile the realms of life and art.
September 29, 2026 page 1 – 69
October 6, 2026 page 70 – 133
October 13, 2026 page 133 – 194
October 20, 2026 page 194- 269
October 27, 2026 page 269 – 324
November 3, 2026 page 327 – 411
November 10, 2026 page 411 – 492
November 17, 2026 page 495 – 569
November 24, 2026 page 570 – end
other editions:
September 29, 2026 Part 1 – chapter 8
October 6, 2026 Part 1 chapter 9 – chapter 12
October 13, 2026 Part 1 chapter 13 – Part 2 chapter 18
October 20, 2026 Part 2 chapter 19 – chapter 24
October 27, 2026 Part 2 chapter 25 – chapter 28
November 3, 2026 Part 3 chapter 29 – chapter 34
November 10, 2026 Part 3 chapter 35 – chapter 39
November 17, 2026 Part 4 chapter 40 – chapter 43
November 24, 2026 Part 4 chapter 44 – end
Haruki Murakami The Wind-up Bird Chronicle Vintage International
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is many things: The story of a marriage that mysteriously collapses; a jeremiad against the superficiality of contemporary politics; an investigation of painfully suppressed memories of war; a bildungsroman about a compassionate young man’s search for his own identity as well as that of his nation. All of Murakami’s storytelling genius—combining elements of detective fiction, deadpan humor, and metaphysical truth, and swiftly transforming commonplace realism into surreal revelation—is on full, seamless display. And in turning his literary imagination loose on a broad social and political canvas, he bares nothing less than the soul of a country steeped in the violence of the twentieth century. Deceptively simple, wise, poignant, funny, and horrifying.
December 8, 2026 page 1 – 80
December 15, 2026 page 81 – 150
December 22, 2026 page 151 – 221
December 29, 2026 page 222 – 302
January 5, 2027 page 303 – 376
January 12, 2027 page 377 – 445
January 19, 2027 page 446 – 522
January 26, 2027 page 523 – end
other editions:
December 8, 2026 Book 1 start – chapter 6
December 15, 2026 Chapter 7 – chapter 12
December 22, 2026 Chapter 13 – Book 2 chapter 5
December 29, 2026 Book 2 chapter 6 – chapter 13
January 5, 2027 Book 2 chapter 14 – Book 3 chapter 5
January 12, 2027 Book 3 chapter 6 – chapter 14
January 19, 2027 Book 3 chapter 15 – chapter 26
January 26, 2027 Book 3 chapter 27 – end
Richard Wright Native Son Harper Perennial Modern Classics
It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s. Thomas accidentally kills a white woman at a time when racism is at its peak and he pays the price for it. While not apologizing for Bigger’s crimes, Wright portrays a systemic causation behind them. Bigger’s lawyer, Boris Max, makes the case that there is no escape from this destiny for his client or any other black American, since they are the necessary product of the society that formed them and told them since birth who exactly they were supposed to be.
February 9, 2027 page 1 – 93
February 16, 2027 page 97 – 189
February 23, 2027 page 190 – 270
March 2, 2027 page 273 – 363
March 9, 2027 page 363 – end
other editions:
February 9, 2027 Book 1: Fear
February 16, 2027 Book 2 : Flight – “yes right away I’ll be waiting”
February 23, 2027 “He had to get back to his room.” – end of Book 2
March 2, 2027 Book 3: Fate – “I don’t want to die . . . .”
March 9, 2027 “Having been bound over” – end
New England Readers and Writers is a voluntary group hosting free workshops serving curious readers and aspiring writers. Our current workshop leaders are:
Michael L. Sevy – Literature Group
…Currently co-leading the Literature Group, Michael recently retired from a career beginning in advertising (including writing and editing for various trade magazines) then working as a database administrator for a financial software company. Composing and playing music from punk rock to ambient and classical minimalism has been a constant throughout. A fiction writer, he has been published in 3:AM Magazine, minor literature[s] and Burning House Press.
Michael tries to keep the Lit Group weekly sessions lively with an emphasis on deep analysis of difficult works and explorations of experimental prose and form. Leaning toward long, slow non-narrative fiction in his own reading, favorite authors include László Krasznahorkai, Clarice Lispector, Natsume Sōseki, Marguerite Duras, Robert Musil and Georges Perec.
Short stories by Michael published here: https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-melodic-line-that-obsessed-my-thoughts/ and https://minorliteratures.com/2025/02/04/the-barco-the-american-pneumatic-the-chicago-pneumatic-michael-l-sevy/ and https://burninghousepress.com/2025/09/18/fingerprint-by-michael-l-sevy/ and https://ricjournal.com/2025/11/19/paper-birch-michael-l-sevy/ and https://www.underscoremag.com/issues/issue-6/a-beautiful-cacophony.
Some of Michael’s music can be heard here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL35AAAEE961CAC765
Patrick Brownson – Literature Group
…got his B.A. in Honors English Literature and Western Society & Culture from Concordia University, in Montreal, QC. He is currently co-leader of the Literature Group which started as a small group of readers tackling “Infinite Jest” in the summer of 2013, and became a year-round Lit. group in the summer of 2015. He has also spent time as fiction co-editor and manuscript reader at the Mud Season Review. He is the father of a boy, Wallace and a girl, Sylvia.
Below are the books previously discussed in the group:
Elena Ferrante – My Brilliant Friend
Don DeLillo – White Noise
Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities
David Foster Wallace – Infinite Jest
William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom
Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita
James Baldwin – Giovanni’s Room
James Joyce – Ulysses
Ali Smith – How To Be Both
Clarice Lispector – The Passion According to G .H.
George Eliot – Middlemarch
Dennis Johnson – Angels and Jesus’ Son
Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
Herman Melville – Moby Dick
Georges Perec – Life, A User’s Manual
Anna Burns – Milkman
Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Brothers Karamazov
Enrique Vila-Matas – Mac’s Problem
Gerald Murnane – Barley Patch
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Americanah
Octavia E. Butler – Parable of the Sower
Don DeLillo – Underworld
Albert Camus – The Plague
José Saramago – Blindness
Giovanni Boccaccio – The Decameron
Vladimir Nabokov – Pnin
Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire
Samuel Beckett – Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)
William Faulkner – The Hamlet
Malcolm Lowry – Under The Volcano
Yoko Tawada – The Emissary
Yoko Ogawa – The Memory Police
Edna O’Brien – A Pagan Place
Alice Munro – Lives of Girls and Women
Nikolai Gogol – Dead Souls
Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children
Lucia Berlin – A Manual for Cleaning Women
Alfred Doblin – Berlin Alexanderplatz
Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook
Philip Roth – Zuckerman Bound
W. G. Sebald – Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn
Mariam Petrosyan – The Gray House
Olga Tokarczuk – Flights
J. M. Coetzee – Age of Iron and Disgrace
Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse and The Waves
William Gaddis – The Recognitions
Annie Ernaux – A Man’s Place, A Woman’s Story and Shame
Orhan Pamuk – My Name is Red
Laurence Sterne – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
César Aira – An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Varamo, The Little Buddhist Monk and The Divorce
Roberto Bolaño – Distant Star
Toni Morrison – Song of Solomon and Jazz
László Krasznahorkai – Seiobo There Below
Patrick Modiano – Missing Person and Suspended Sentences
Iris Murdoch – Under the Net and The Black Prince
David Foster Wallace – The Pale King
Colum McCann – Let the Great World Spin
Saul Bellow – Henderson the Rain King and Herzog
Thomas Pynchon – Gravity’s Rainbow
Nadine Gordimer – July’s People
Hwang Sok-Yong – The Guest
Gabriel García Márquez – The Autumn of the Patriarch
Vladimir Nabokov – Ada, or Ardor
Franz Kafka – The Trial
Helen DeWitt – The Last Samurai
Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary