About Us

The Brown Book Club will meet on Sunday, May 19 to discuss Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain (nonfiction, 312 pp, 2000). We’ll begin at 6PM with dinner, then go on to discussion. Please RSVP by Friday, May 17 by contacting the event organizer, who will provide location information. Mention any food allergies, and bring $6 – $8 for the meal.

“Utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and precise ear for kitchen patois.” (New York magazine)

“The kind of book you read in one sitting, then rush about annoying your coworkers by declaiming whole passages.” (USA Today)

“Bourdain captures the world of restaurants and professionally cooked food in all its theatrical, demented glory.” (USA Today)

“A gonzo memoir of whats really going on behind those swinging doors…. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain is unique.” (Newsweek)

“Bourdain’s prose is utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and a precise ear for kitchen patois.” (New York Magazine)

Open to all alumni.  Please contact Corey Lipow (clipow@gmail.com) with questions.

Open to all alumni.  Please contact Corey Lipow (clipow@gmail.com) with questions.

The Brown Book Club will meet on Sunday, July 14 to discuss Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Less (fiction, 272 pp, 2017). We’ll begin at 6PM with dinner, then go on to discussion. Please RSVP by Friday, July 12 by contacting the event organizer, who will provide location information. Mention any food allergies, and bring $6 – $8 for the meal.

“Who says you can’t run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes–it would be too awkward–and you can’t say no–it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.

QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?

ANSWER: You accept them all.

A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as “inspired, lyrical,” “elegiac,” “ingenious,” as well as “too sappy by half,” Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.” — Amazon Book Review

The Brown Book Club will meet on Sunday, September 8 in Reston, VA to discuss Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout (fiction, 294 pp, 2007). We’ll begin at 6PM with dinner, then go on to discussion. Please RSVP by Friday, September 6 by contacting the event organizer, who will provide location information. Mention any food allergies, and bring $6 – $8 for the meal.

“Strout, author of the Pultizer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge, welcomes readers back to the archetypal, lovely landscape of northern New England. In the late 1950s, in the small town of West Annett, Maine, a minister, Tyler, struggles to regain his calling, his family, and his happiness in the wake of profound loss. At the same time, the community he has served so charismatically must come to terms with its own strengths and failings, faith and hypocrisy, loyalty and abandonment, when a dark secret is revealed. In prose incandescent and artful, Strout draws readers into the details of ordinary life in a way that makes it extraordinary. All is considered: life, love, God, and community within these pages, and all is made new by this writer’s boundless compassion and graceful prose.” A New York Times bestseller.