Small Press fiction book club
Small presses publish some of the most exciting and most innovative fiction today. In this book club we’ll read books from independent publishing houses where risks are being taken and new voices discovered. A different small press will be featured each month, and members can vote on what to read next. We'll read books from Archipelago, Feminist Press, Two Dollar Radio, Other Press, Verso, Tin House, and more.
Welcome to 2026! Small Press Book Club will be meeting on Thursday, January 29th at 7pm. We will be reading STONER by Vriginia Woolf, an edition published by New York Review of Books. You can purchase the book by clicking here.
About the book:
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams's luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
PAST BOOK CLUBS
