DSM Book Club

We think the best part of finishing a good book is talking about it with friends. That’s why we’ve started the DSM Book Club. 

The DSM Book Club is a new online sharing session designed to showcase our favorite reads and get you ready to meet the authors at our March Festival. This Club will inspire you with a monthly pick and features an online Zoom book discussion. Each month will feature one book that is connected to The Festival and an individual registration for participation. We hope you will join us every month, but there’s no guilt if you miss one.

Participation in the DSM Book Club is FREE thanks to our sponsors.

August 2021: "The Plot" by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Club Meeting: August 26 at 7 p.m.  |  Register Now

Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he’s teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect; he hasn’t written—let alone published—anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn’t need Jake’s help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then . . . he hears the plot.

Jake returns to the downward trajectory of his own career and braces himself for the supernova publication of Evan Parker’s first novel: but it never comes. When he discovers that his former student has died, presumably without ever completing his book, Jake does what any self-respecting writer would do with a story like that?a story that absolutely needs to be told.

In a few short years, all of Evan Parker’s predictions have come true, but Jake is the author enjoying the wave. He is wealthy, famous, praised and read all over the world. But at the height of his glorious new life, an e-mail arrives, the first salvo in a terrifying, anonymous campaign: You are a thief, it says.

As Jake struggles to understand his antagonist and hide the truth from his readers and his publishers, he begins to learn more about his late student, and what he discovers both amazes and terrifies him. Who was Evan Parker, and how did he get the idea for his “sure thing” of a novel? What is the real story behind the plot, and who stole it from whom?

About the Author

Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of the novels “You Should Have Known” (adapted for HBO as "The Undoing" by David E. Kelley, and starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland), “Admission” (adapted as the 2013 film starring Tina Fey), “The Devin and Webster”, “The White Rose”, The Sabbathday River” and “A Jury of Her Peers”. Her company BOOKTHEWRITER hosts "Pop-Up Book Groups" in NYC, where small groups of readers can discuss new books with their authors. bookthewriter.com