WICE upcoming events

LA231 Living Room Players: "A Streetcar Named Desire," by Tennessee Williams (23 Apr 2026)

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Set in the humid, restless atmosphere of New Orleans A Streetcar Named Desire follows the tragic unraveling of Blanche DuBois, a fragile and fading Southern belle who arrives unexpectedly at the modest apartment of her younger sister, Stella Kowalski who welcomes her warmly, but Blanche quickly clashes with Stella’s husband, Stanley Kowalski.

Through the clash between Blanche’s fading romantic ideals and Stanley’s raw realism, author Tennessee Williams explores themes of illusion versus reality, desire, class conflict, mental fragility, and the changing social landscape of the American South. The play remains one of the most powerful examinations of human vulnerability and cruelty in modern theatre.

The general concept of The Living Room Players is that people receive the script by email about a week before the reading, and then roles are assigned at the meeting. Attendees sit around a living room and simply read their parts with as much theatrical flourish as they care to give (but there are no expectations of real acting).

The readings take place at a member's apartment in the Marais. The address, door code, and phone number are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered seven days before the event, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration for the April reading opens on Friday, 20 March.

LA241 Booker Books: "The Rest of Our Lives," by Ben Markovitz (24 Apr 2026)

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:00:00 GMT

The Rest of Our Lives is a quiet, meticulously observed "state-of-the-nation" novel that transforms the standard mid-life crisis into a profound meditation on the "slow erosion of the will". The story follows Tom Layward, a fifty-five-year-old law professor who has spent twelve years harboring a secret resolution: to leave his wife, Amy, the moment their youngest child leaves for college. After dropping his daughter off at university in Pittsburgh, Tom chooses not to return to his New York home, instead continuing to drive west in a "vague, peripatetic" quest to revisit the ghosts of his past.

Moving across the American landscape from New Jersey to California, the narrative is structured around Tom’s encounters with old flames, estranged friends, and his own brother, punctuated by pickup basketball games where he briefly recaptures his youthful vitality. Yet, beneath the familiar tropes of the American road novel lies a deeper, more clinical tension: Tom is keeping secrets not only from his wife but from himself, including a looming career crisis and a mysterious, worsening medical condition that he refuses to acknowledge. Markovits employs a "disarmingly plain-speaking" voice to peel back the layers of a thirty-year "C-minus marriage," exploring how resentment and love can exist in the same stagnant air.

Often compared to the works of Richard Ford and John Updike, The Rest of Our Lives is a "wry, poignant" study of masculine vulnerability and the "unreliable edges" of self-narration. A strong discussion angle for the group is Tom’s insistence on "grading" his life and relationships—and whether his cross-country flight is a rational pursuit of freedom or a desperate, pathological retreat from a reality he can no longer control.

Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by one week prior to the meeting, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration for the April meeting opens on Saturday, 28 March.

LA251 Left Bank Lit: "Paris Was Yesterday," by Janet (Genêt) Flanner (25 Apr 2026)

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Few writers observed expatriate Paris with as much wit, elegance, and insight as Janet Flanner. Her collection Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939 gathers selected pieces from her celebrated “Letter from Paris” column in The New Yorker, written under the pen name Genêt.

Living in Paris for decades, Flanner chronicled the city’s transformation from the exuberant café society of the 1920s through the political tensions and cultural upheavals of the 1930s. Her dispatches capture both the glitter and the gravity of the era—portraits of artists like Picasso and Colette sit beside reports on fashion, scandal, and the rise of fascism. With her cool, incisive style and cosmopolitan detachment, Flanner stands apart from her contemporaries on the Left Bank: neither romanticizing Paris like Hemingway nor mythologizing it like Barnes, but recording it as it was—vivid, contradictory, and alive.

Paris Was Yesterday offers an incomparable window onto the daily rhythms, personalities, and anxieties of a city—and a generation—on the edge of modern history.

LA281 The Long View: "Salt: A World History," by Mark Kurlansky (28 Apr 2026)

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Salt: A World History is a "brilliant, multi-layered" work of narrative non-fiction that transforms a common tabletop condiment into the central protagonist of human civilization. Mark Kurlansky traces the global impact of sodium chloride—the only rock humans eat—from the dawn of recorded history to the modern era, revealing how the quest for this "white gold" has shaped empires, ignited revolutions, and dictated the patterns of human settlement.

The narrative moves fluidly across continents and centuries, detailing how salt’s unique preservative qualities allowed for the first long-distance trade and exploration. Kurlansky explores its role in diverse historical turning points: from the building of the Great Wall of China and the financing of the French Monarchy via the hated gabelle tax, to its central role in the American Revolution and Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March against British colonial rule. Along the way, he provides a "fascinating cabinet of curiosities," including ancient recipes for garum, the development of salt-cured cod and ham, and the complex chemistry of how salt interacts with the human body.

Written with a "dry wit and an eye for the telling detail," the book is a meditation on how a substance we now take for granted was once the world’s most sought-after commodity. A strong discussion angle for the group is Kurlansky's "micro-history" approach—how focusing on a single, mundane object can provide a more vivid and honest understanding of global history than traditional political or military narratives.

Winner of the 2003 James Beard Foundation Award for Writing on Food.

Due to the unusually large interest in "The Long View"'s last book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, we had an unusually large waitlist of people who wanted to join but could not. Priority registration for this book discussion will go to them, and people on this waitlist will get priority registration for the next book discussion.

General registration opens on Thursday, 12 March.

This book is 496 pages long.

LY011 Murder, They Read: "The Blessing Way," by Tony Hillerman (01 May 2026)

Fri, 01 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

While investigating a murder on the Navajo Reservation in the Southwestern US, Navajo Police Officer Joseph Leaphorn encounters what appear to be ritualistic elements linked to Navajo beliefs. Meanwhile, Leaphorn’s friend, anthropologist Bergen McKee, while visiting the Navajo Nation for his research on witches, becomes entangled in a particularly challenging series of events in the canyons. This novel, first in the Navajo Tribal Police series, blends elements of danger and adventure and a compelling mystery with depictions of Navajo culture, landscape, and spirituality

The Navajo Nation awarded Hillerman the title of Special Friend to the Diné, and his love of the people and the country they inhabit shines through in this book.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered seven days before the event, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration opens on Saturday, 04 April.

LY111 The New Yorker: Short Stories (11 May 2026)

Mon, 11 May 2026 13:00:00 GMT

WICE’s “The New Yorker Short Story Group” is for anyone interested in reading short stories written by some of today’s very best emerging and established authors. Each discussion will focus on 2 short stories published in The New Yorker in the preceding month. The selected stories will be posted here on May 1, 2026.

Visit The New Yorker Fiction & Poetry page to find a complete list of New Yorker short stories (listed in chronological order beginning with the most recently published).

Digital subscribers can access the stories via The New Yorker website or app. (A digital subscription includes access to all New Yorker content, including audio versions of short stories read by the author. Digital subscriptions can be purchased for $5/month or $52/annually here). If you are not a subscriber, you may be able to find the stories in PDF version on-line or through your local library (including the American Library of Paris).

Registration opens on Tuesday, 14 April.

LY121 Classic Mysteries: "The Murder at the Vicarage," by Agatha Christie (12 May 2026)

Tue, 12 May 2026 13:00:00 GMT

The Murder at the Vicarage, by Agatha Christie, is a classic country-village mystery that introduces one of Christie’s most enduring creations: Miss Jane Marple. Set in the seemingly tranquil English village of St. Mary Mead, the novel begins when the universally disliked Colonel Protheroe is found shot dead in the vicar’s study—promptly providing the village with more suspects than anyone expected.

As gossip spreads and alibis multiply, Miss Marple quietly observes from the margins, drawing on her deep understanding of human nature to see what others overlook. Christie contrasts official police methods with Marple’s deceptively simple insights, showing how small habits, grudges, and hypocrisies can conceal darker truths. Wry, sharply observed, and ingeniously plotted, The Murder at the Vicarage blends classic detective puzzle-solving with social comedy, using village life itself as both setting and source of clues. The novel established Miss Marple as a new kind of detective—unassuming, incisive, and profoundly attuned to the moral complexities beneath everyday respectability.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 07 May, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration opens on Wednesday, 15 April.

LY151 Café Littéraire: "Adele," by Leïla Slimani (15 May 2026)

Fri, 15 May 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Adèle is a provocative and tensely strung character study that explores the "hellishness of the ordinary" through the lens of addiction. The novel centers on Adèle Robinson, a successful Parisian journalist who appears to have a flawless life, complete with a surgeon husband, a young son, and an elegant apartment in the 18th arrondissement. Beneath this polished veneer of bourgeois respectability, however, Adèle is consumed by a relentless and insatiable compulsion for anonymous sexual encounters.

Written in "bracingly spare" and clinical prose, the narrative follows Adèle as she orchestrates her life around one-night stands and clandestine affairs, leading a double life that begins to unravel as her compulsions grow more reckless. Rather than an erotic exploration of pleasure, Slimani depicts Adèle’s addiction as an anhedonic struggle—a "perpetual flight from herself" fueled by a deep-seated sense of meaninglessness and an "aching void". The story reaches a turning point when her husband, Richard, discovers her secret, leading to a stark shift in control as he moves the family to the Normandy countryside in a desperate, suffocating attempt to "cure" her.

Often described as a modern-day Madame Bovary, Adèle is a dark meditation on female subjectivity, maternal anxiety, and the stifling nature of social expectations. A strong discussion angle for the group is the novel's refusal to offer easy psychological diagnoses or redemption for its protagonist. Instead, it invites readers to interrogate whether Adèle is an aggressor destroying her family or a tragic figure trapped by her own "nothingness" and a society that offers no real liberty.

Winner of the 2015 La Mamounia Prize for Moroccan literature.

The book group meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails, following registration.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 15 March, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration for the May meeting opens on Saturday, 18 April.

LY161 Left Bank Literature Walk (16 May 2026)

Sat, 16 May 2026 07:00:00 GMT

A leisurely stroll through the 5th and 6th arrondissements, visiting sites—dwellings, cafés, bookstores—associated with the creative literary outburst that was centered here between the two World Wars.

Sites will include (but not be limited to):

Ernest and Hadley Hemingway's apartment.
James Joyce's digs where he finished Ulysses.
The hotel where George Orwell lived in Down and Out in Paris and London.
Hemingway's morning walk to Place Saint Michel.
The original Shakespeare and Company.
The apartment where Gertrude Stein held her famous salons.

Members who have attended the "Left Bank Lit" book reading group will get priority registration for this event.

General registration opens on 23 April.

LY161 Tea and Tattered Pages: Adventures in Poetry (16 May 2026)

Sat, 16 May 2026 12:30:00 GMT

Tea and Tattered Pages: Adventures in Poetry

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry." -Emily Dickinson

Program Description:

Tea and Tattered Pages is a multi-faceted program designed to bring poetry closer to the fore in our lives, and perhaps create a small community around it. Our activities include reading, writing, discussing, reciting, and trying to live poetry.

There will be no fixed agenda for events; rather, forthcoming events will usually be decided by vote as we move through the year, and published as things are decided. You can get a sense of what sorts of activities we will be doing on the program's web page:

Tea and Tattered Pages

May Agenda

The May agenda is being developed and will be posted no later than Saturday, 18 April. Registration will open as soon as the agenda has been developed.

Instructors:

Heather Hartley

Heather Hartley’s poetry collections include Adult Swim and Knock Knock, both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She was Paris Editor for Tin House magazine for over fifteen years.

Her short fiction, poems, essays and interviews have appeared in or on PBS Newshour, The Guardian, The Literary Review and other venues. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kent’s (UK) Paris School of Arts and Culture and has also taught at the American University of Paris and the University of Texas El Paso MFA program.

www.heatherhartleyink.com

LY211 Living Room Players: Play To Be Determined (21 May 2026)

Thu, 21 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The May play selection and description will be posted on or about Friday, 17 April (or before).

The readings take place at a member's apartment in the Marais. The address, door code, and phone number are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered seven days before the event, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration for the May reading opens on Friday, 17 April.

LY221 Booker Books: "Creation Lake," by Rachel Kushner (22 May 2026)

Fri, 22 May 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Creation Lake is a coolly brilliant, genre-bending novel that masks a profound philosophical treatise within the sleek framework of a spy noir. The narrative is led by "Sadie Smith," a thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of "ruthless tactics and clean beauty," who has been hired by shadowy corporate interests to infiltrate a radical eco-activist commune in the Guyenne region of rural France. Tasked with inciting provocation to justify a government crackdown, Sadie maneuvers through a landscape of ancient farms and "real Europe" distribution warehouses, viewing the idealistic activists with a detached, cynical eye.

The novel’s propulsive energy is regularly punctuated by the intellectual ruminations of Bruno Lacombe, the commune’s eccentric mentor who lives in a prehistoric cave and communicates only via email. As Sadie intercepts and reads Bruno’s missives, she becomes unexpectedly mesmerized by his theories on Neanderthals, whom he believes were a superior, more empathetic species than Homo sapiens. These "counter-histories" begin to erode Sadie’s carefully maintained detachment, forcing her to confront a "piercingly moral" awakening as she realizes she may be the architect of a catastrophe that threatens her own humanity.

Written in taut, "vaulting" sections, Creation Lake is both a high-stakes thriller and a meditation on the "failures of self-liberation" in a world dominated by late-stage capitalism. A strong discussion angle for the group is the contrast between Sadie’s performative identity and Bruno’s search for an authentic, ancient past—and whether Sadie’s ultimate "salt," her core essence, is as hard and nihilistic as she initially claims.

Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by one week prior to the meeting, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration for the May meeting opens on Saturday, 25 April.

LU051 Murder, They Read: "Harlem Shuffle," by Colson Whitehead (05 Jun 2026)

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Harlem Shuffle,by 2 time Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur fellow Colson Whitehead, follows Ray Carney, a small businessman living in 1960s Harlem. Carney sees himself as an honest businessman trying to climb into the middle class, but due to the need to support his family and the difficulty of doing so, he sometimes steps over the line. When his ne’er do well cousin Freddie involves him in a plan for a robbery, Carney is pulled deeper into crime. As the years pass, he navigates corrupt police, gangsters, and shifting Harlem politics while trying to protect his business and family. Blending crime story and social portraiture, the novel explores ambition, survival, and the complicated line between respectability and criminality in a changing Harlem.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered seven days before the event, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration opens on Saturday, 02 May.

LU081 The New Yorker: Short Stories (08 Jun 2026)

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Visit The New Yorker Fiction & Poetry page to find a complete list of New Yorker short stories (listed in chronological order beginning with the most recently published).

Registration opens on Tuesday, 12 May.

LU091 Classic Mysteries: "The Moving Toy Shop," by Edmund Crispin (09 Jun 2026)

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:00:00 GMT

The Moving Toyshop is a quintessential "Golden Age" mystery that prioritizes intellectual high spirits and surreal wit over gritty realism. The story follows Richard Cadogan, a frustrated poet who travels to Oxford in search of inspiration, only to stumble into a locked toyshop in the middle of the night where he discovers the body of a strangled woman. After being knocked unconscious, Cadogan wakes up to a baffling reality: the toyshop has completely vanished, replaced by a mundane grocery store that appears to have been there for years.

To solve the impossible disappearance, Cadogan enlists his old friend Gervase Fen, an eccentric Oxford Professor of English Language and Literature who moonlights as a reckless amateur detective. What follows is a "breezy, Hollywood-style romp" through the streets of Oxford as the duo careens about in a beat-up sports car, deciphering clues hidden in Edward Lear’s limericks and uncovering a complex web involving an insane will and a cast of colorful suspects. Crispin’s writing is famously "donnish," peppered with literary allusions, wordplay, and meta-fictional nods—including Fen’s habit of breaking the fourth wall to complain about the plot.

Described by P.D. James as one of the most riveting crime novels ever written, The Moving Toyshop is a "darkly comic requiem" to the traditional detective story, blending situation comedy with genuine suspense. A strong discussion angle for the group is Crispin’s use of Oxford as a "progenitor of unlikely events"—a setting where the line between academic eccentricity and criminal absurdity becomes delightfully blurred.

The novel’s climactic merry-go-round sequence famously served as the uncredited inspiration for the finale of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by five days before the group meets, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration opens on Wednesday, 13 May.

LU131 Tea and Tattered Pages: Adventures in Poetry (13 Jun 2026)

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:30:00 GMT

Tea and Tattered Pages: Adventures in Poetry

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry." -Emily Dickinson

Program Description:

Tea and Tattered Pages

June Agenda

The June agenda has yet to be determined, but we are considering joint readings by poet-in-residence Heather Hartley and haiku writer/teacher Anna Eklund-Cheong.

The agenda will be finalized by 9 May.

If you have any questions, please contact literature@wice-paris.org

Instructors:

Heather Hartley

Heather Hartley’s poetry collections include Adult Swim and Knock Knock, both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She was Paris Editor for Tin House magazine for over fifteen years.

www.heatherhartleyink.com

LU181 Living Room Players: Play To Be Determined (18 Jun 2026)

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The June play selection and description will be posted on or about Friday, 22 May (or before).

The readings take place at a member's apartment in the Marais. The address, door code, and phone number are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered seven days before the event, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration for the May reading opens on Friday, 22 May.

LU191 Café Littéraire: "Life: A User's Manual," by Georges Perec (19 Jun 2026)

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Life: A User’s Manual is often described as an "encyclopedic" tapestry of human existence. Set within a single fictional apartment block at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris, the novel is frozen in time at the exact moment of a resident’s death: June 23, 1975, at 8:00 PM. From this static instant, Perec meticulously "dissects" the building, moving chapter by chapter through its rooms to reveal the interconnected lives, histories, and secrets of its inhabitants.

The narrative is famously governed by an intricate set of mathematical and formal constraints—a hallmark of Perec’s work with the Oulipo group. The order of the 99 chapters follows a "knight’s tour" across a 10x10 grid of the building’s layout, ensuring the reader visits every room without ever repeating a path. At the heart of these nested stories is the eccentric Englishman Percival Bartlebooth, who devises a 50-year plan to travel the world, paint 500 watercolors of seaports, have them turned into jigsaw puzzles, and ultimately destroy them so that no trace of his life’s work remains.

Both a playful puzzle and a mournful meditation on the "unquenchable thereness" of objects, Life: A User’s Manual transforms a mundane apartment block into a microcosm of the world. A strong discussion angle for the group is Perec’s use of exhaustive detail—inventories of furniture, lists of books, and descriptions of paintings—and whether these rigid structures succeed in capturing the "totality" of life or merely underscore its ultimate incompleteness.

Winner of the 1978 Prix Médicis.

The book group meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails, following registration.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 15 March, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration for the June meeting opens on Saturday, 16 May.

LU261 Booker Books: "Flashlight," by Susan Choi (26 Jun 2026)

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Flashlight is a sprawling and ambitious historical saga that mines the "tides of 20th-century history" to explore the enduring ripples of family trauma. The narrative is set in motion during a summer in a coastal Japanese town, where ten-year-old Louisa and her father, Serk—a Korean émigré and academic—take a walk out on a breakwater. When Louisa wakes hours later, washed up on the beach, her father has vanished, an event that shatters her small family and leaves a void that reverberates across decades and continents.

The novel skillfully criss-crosses between the post-war Korean immigrant community in Japan, the rigid North Korean regime, and the quiet suburbs of America. As the mystery of Serk’s disappearance slowly unravels, the story expands to include Anne, Louisa’s secretive and increasingly isolated mother, and Tobias, the son Anne was forced to give up for adoption years earlier, who eventually drifts back into their lives. Choi balances these "intimate dramas" with "geopolitically bold" themes, moving from a poignant family mystery into a riveting exploration of identity, race, and national belonging.

Elegantly written and emotionally profound, Flashlight is described by critics as both a "capacious" historical reconstruction and a high-concept meditation on the "unreliable edges" of memory. A strong discussion angle for the group is Choi’s use of "narrative layers" and how the characters are shaped more by what they cannot see or remember than by the objective truths of their past.

Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by one week prior to the meeting, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration for the June meeting opens on Saturday, 23 May.

LU271 Left Bank Lit: "The Autobiography of Alice B. Tolkas," by Gertrude Stein (27 Jun 2026)

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) is one of the most charming and paradoxical works of modernist literature—a memoir written by Stein, but in the voice of her lifelong companion, Alice B. Toklas.

Through this playful act of ventriloquism, Stein recounts their shared life in Paris from the early 1900s through the 1930s, when their apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus became the heart of the city’s artistic avant-garde. On Saturday evenings, their salon gathered an extraordinary constellation of painters and writers—Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, and many others—who came to debate, provoke, and be seen. The book mixes gossip and genius, art history and personal mythmaking, with Stein’s distinctive, rhythmic prose giving the whole an almost musical quality. Both self-portrait and social chronicle, captures the exuberance and eccentricity of a generation inventing itself in real time. As the closing work in your series, it returns the reader to the source: the Left Bank as a living ecosystem of conversation, experiment, and friendship—a “moveable feast” of its own making.

Registration opens on Sunday, 24 May.

LL131 The New Yorker: Short Stories (13 Jul 2026)

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Visit The New Yorker Fiction & Poetry page to find a complete list of New Yorker short stories (listed in chronological order beginning with the most recently published).

Registration opens on Tuesday, 9 June.

LG101 The New Yorker: Short Stories (10 Aug 2026)

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Visit The New Yorker Fiction & Poetry page to find a complete list of New Yorker short stories (listed in chronological order beginning with the most recently published).

Registration opens on Tuesday, 14 July.

LS141 The New Yorker: Short Stories (14 Sep 2026)

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:00:00 GMT

WICE’s “New Yorker Short Story Group” is for anyone interested in reading short stories and novellas written by some of today’s very best emerging and established authors. Each monthly discussion will focus on 2-3 stories recently published in the New Yorker. Selections will be announced one month prior to the next scheduled meeting.

Stories for Monday, 14 September will be announced on or about 11 August.

Registration opens on Tuesday, 11 August.

LS181 Café Littéraire: "The Great Swindle," by Pierre Lemaitre (18 Sep 2026)

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:00:00 GMT

The Great Swindle is a sweeping, picaresque epic that examines the "murky virtues of remembrance" in the hollow aftermath of World War I. The story begins in the final, desperate days of the war, when the ruthless Lieutenant Henri d’Aulnay-Pradelle orchestrates a senseless skirmish, an act of treachery that binds together the fates of two subordinates: Albert Maillard, a timid former bank clerk, and Édouard Péricourt, a brilliant artist from a wealthy family. While saving Albert’s life, Édouard is hideously disfigured—becoming a gueule cassée (broken face)—and subsequently fakes his own death to avoid returning to his estranged father.

Moving from the trenches to the "glittering but dark" streets of 1920s Paris, the narrative follows the two veterans as they struggle with poverty, morphine addiction, and a society that seems to "revere its dead more than its survivors". In a cynical act of revenge against the country that abandoned them, they devise an audacious scam: selling fraudulent monuments to honor the very war heroes the nation is so eager to memorialize. Meanwhile, the villainous Pradelle launches a ghoulish swindle of his own, profiting from the exhumation and reburial of fallen soldiers in cut-rate coffins.

Lemaitre, a master of suspense, employs a dry, ironic tone to craft a "darkly comic requiem" that feels like a 19th-century novel updated with modern clinical precision. A strong discussion angle for the group is Lemaitre’s exploration of the "great swindle" of the title—whether it refers to the characters’ specific scams or the broader, abominable treatment of the ordinary soldier by a state more interested in the aesthetics of grief than the reality of its victims.

Winner of the 2013 Prix Goncourt.

The book group meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails, following registration.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by five days prior to the meeting, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration for the September meeting opens on 01 September.