The John Williams Book Club starts on Saturday, and discussion questions went out to everyone a few days ago.

If you didn’t get that email, you’re not signed up for this club.

Sign up

We’re not reading any of Stoner before our first session, but we are going to look at its opening pages together. I’ll have slides of the opening pages for us to look at, for anyone who doesn’t have their book yet.

According to the New York Times Book Review, “Stoner is something rarer than a great novel — it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away.”

The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel is the name of a 2020 biography of John Williams, written by Charles J. Shields, that I’ve been reading in preparation for this class. The photo of Williams at the top of this post, in his military uniform, appears in that biography.

In addition to looking at the opening pages of Stoner together, we’re also going to look at a Shakespeare sonnet and talk about it.

That sonnet — and a few discussion questions about it — were sent out to everyone in the club a few days ago. If you sign up now, that sonnet and those discussion questions will be included with your receipt and confirmation.

The zoom link for the first meeting will be sent out to everyone in the club tomorrow.

To join this club, just buy a ticket.

After we read Stoner, we’re going to read Augustus — a novel about the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus.

This FrizzLit club will be ten weeks long, the first five weeks reading Stoner, the next five weeks reading Augustus.

If you’re only interested in one or the other, you don’t need to sign up for the full 10 weeks. You can just join for the book you’re interested in.

Stoner: March 14-April 11

Augustus: April 18-May 16

All meetings are recorded — so if you miss any of the live sessions, you won’t miss anything.

Past FrizzLit book clubs

What are FrizzLit book clubs like? If you’re a paid subscriber to this Substack, you can find out by accessing the full video archives of the FrizzLit classes on…

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Flannery O’Connor’s stories

• Middlemarch by George Eliot

• Herman Melville’s stories

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

• Mozart

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

• Dorothy Parker’s short stories

• Ernest Hemingway’s short stories and A Farewell to Arms

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Thanks to our paid subscribers for keeping these archives available!

Your subscription helps cover the costs of storing these large video files.

Join the club

To join a FrizzLit book club, just buy a ticket.

You don’t need to read anything before our first meeting, but try to have a copy of Stoner with you, because we are going to take a look at its opening pages together.

There will be a few “getting to know you” type discussion questions, keyed to the themes in this book, that everyone will get by email 24 hours before we start.

Recommended editions

• Stoner

• Augustus

If you have a different edition of one of these books, or a copy from a library, that works too!

Join in installments

If you don’t want to commit to the full 10 weeks up front, you can just join the first half to read Stoner, and decide after that if you want to read Augustus, and sign up for part two then.

Or, if you’ve already read Stoner and don’t feel like re-reading it, you can just join the second half of the club to read Augustus.

All classes are recorded

The recordings will be sent to the email address you use to sign up for the club. You will receive the recordings 24-48 hours after each session has concluded.

Reading schedule

The reading schedule — which specific chapters and pages we’re discussing on which days — will be provided to everyone during our first meeting together. You have to be signed up to be invited to that Zoom meeting.

This year, we’re tackling Handel’s Messiah. The club is a Zoom class that meets four Tuesday nights in a row starting November 18. All meetings are recorded.

To join the club, just click here:

Join the club

During the conversation in the video above, Chris said he would put some links “in the comments.”

We’re going to add those links to the the receipt and confirmation for everyone who signs up — so, if you do join the club, look for that in your email.

If you have already joined the club, you will be emailed those links soon.

In the above video, we also walk to cemeteries near our houses — Lydgate in Portland, Oregon; Frizzelle in Seattle — and talk about:

• squirrels

• Moby Dick

• choral music

• England in the 1700s

• powdered wigs

• the time someone retrieved a dagger from a kid’s mouth by using magnets

• the occupation “barber-surgeon”

And more.

More info about the Handel class

The last time Lydgate led a classical music club for FrizzLit, it was on Mozart, and it was glorious.

You can watch that here.

Get more from Christopher Frizzelle in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Join the holiday music club

If you have ever dipped into the video archive of Chris Lydgate’s Mozart Club for FrizzLit, you know how good he is at talking about classical music.

How the compositions work and how they work their magic on you. The stories behind how their works got written, and how the crowd responded. The details and eccentricities of the life of the composer. The reasons their work changed music forever.

Plus, in FrizzLit classical music clubs, unlike in our book clubs, there’s no reading assignments and no homework. Easy peasy! It’s nothing at all like the Moby Dick club, where there’s a new reading assignment every week, and there’s nothing easy about it.

For Chris Lydgate’s music clubs, you just tune in, listen to music, and hear incredible story after incredible story.

Join the holiday music club

I, for one, can’t wait.

What I don’t know about classical music is a lot.

I can talk about Herman Melville or Virginia Woolf or Charles Dickens till the cows come home, but I have… [checks memory banks]… a dinosaur egg, a big 0, when it comes to this guy named Handel.

Handel. Handel. Hmm. Absolutely nothing.

When I hear the phrase “the music of Handel”… well, do you want the honest truth?

It’s embarrassing.

But when I hear “the music of Handel,” my brain pictures this:

Or better yet:

Join the holiday music club

As you can see, I have a lot to learn.

And I’m eager to learn it. So I am going to get a little preview of his club with a Substack Live chat this weekend.

Tune in to this FrizzLit substack this coming Saturday, Nov 8, at 1 pm Pacific / 4 pm Eastern. Chris and I will catch up on what we’re reading lately, what we’re listening to, and what we can expect from the Handel club.

I really enjoyed walking through the city for the last Substack Live I did, spur of the moment — but I did that one by myself, and it’s more fun to do them in conversation with someone else.

So, weather permitting, when Chris and I talk on Saturday on Substack Live, I will be walking around Seattle, and Chris will be walking around Portland.

We need a name for our Substack Live. “Keeping Up with the Chrises”? “Chris and Chris Walk and Talk”? If you have any ideas for what our Substack Live should be called, put them in the chat!

In the meantime, you can find out about the Handel club on FrizzLit’s sign-up page: click here.

Join the holiday music club

As for my ignorance, I’m going to spend the next two days picturing this guy — Handel himself — when I hear the phrase “the music of Handel.”

He doesn’t look anything like a handle!

He looks more like a cookie or something.

Can’t wait to hear more about that hair. And, obviously, his mind, his music, his place in history.

Join us

And why he gets inside Chris Lydgate and lights him up.

If you’re interested in seeing what the FrizzLit Book Club is like, here’s the first session of the Moby Dick Book Club.

Speaker view

Gallery view

If you’d like to join us next week, to discuss chapters 1-3, you can sign up here.

Join for the first six weeks

Join for full 4 months

You’ll get a reading schedule for the next four months with your receipt and confirmation.

This is the edition of Moby-Dick we recommend — the paperback Modern Library edition with illustrations by Rockwell Kent.

Pre-order Rebecca’s new book

• My Animal Kingdom comes out December 6

  

We set sail on Monday night.

Join the club

To join the adventure, just buy a ticket.

You can sign up for the full four months, or you can just try the first six weeks and see how you like it.

Try the first 6 weeks

There is no reading assigned before our first meeting, but there are five discussion questions, including

1. What’s the most difficult book you’ve ever read?

2. What is your favorite sea creature?

As for the other three questions?

They will be included with your receipt and confirmation.

Get the book

You don’t need to read anything before we meet, but hopefully you will have your copy of the book, because we are going to look at its opening pages together.

This is the edition of Moby-Dick we recommend — the paperback Modern Library edition with illustrations by Rockwell Kent. (There is also an out-of-print hardback edition with the Kent illustrations, shown in the photo here, possibly available at the library or your nearest used bookstore.)

If you have a different edition that you would prefer to read, that works too.

Don’t worry if you don’t have your book by Monday: we’ll have slides of everything we’re going to look at.

Do not read the introduction in your book if you care about spoilers.

By the way

There are many ways of approaching this novel, and some folks have privately let us know that they won’t even be reading the book — they’re planning to lurk in the back of the class, hear stories about how the book was created, learn about Melville’s life and world, look at passages together, and absorb things that way.

Just so everyone knows: That’s a-okay with us!

Join the club

Reading schedule

For everyone planning to read the novel all the way through, we’ve created a reading schedule for the next four months, and we’ll be sharing that with you on Monday.

Recordings

If you can’t make it Monday night, never fear: Every meeting of this club will be recorded, and the recordings will be emailed to you within 48 hours.

The last time we read Moby Dick

I wrote about for the Washington Post.

Past book clubs

Full recordings of the clubs listed below are available for paid subscribers.

• Flannery O’Connor’s stories

• Middlemarch by George Eliot

• Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” and other stories

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

• Mozart’s music

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

• Ernest Hemingway’s short stories and A Farewell to Arms

• Dorothy Parker

Moby Dick was the first major work of literature we read in the FrizzLit Book Club — back when it was still called the Quarantine Book Club. I wrote about that Moby Dick club for the Washington Post.

It’s the most requested title for a repeat book club — so we’re doing it again, five years later.

Join the club

This time I’m doing it side by side with the novelist, memoirist, and hero of the squirrel community Rebecca Brown.

Rebecca led a FrizzLit club reading Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” and other stories in 2024.

You don’t need to read any of Moby Dick before the first meeting, but you do want to have a copy of the book in your hands.

Join the club

If you don’t want to buy a copy, the library will have a copy of Moby Dick, or you can find it online — it’s in the public domain.

Here’s an incredibly helpful annotated version of the text that it would be a good idea to bookmark, however you’re going to read the book.

Here’s Tilda Swinton and other famous people reading it to you, if you’re more of a listener.

Come the first night of book club expecting to hear a little about Herman Melville’s life, and the context in which he wrote Moby Dick.

All meetings of the FrizzLit Book Club are recorded, so if you miss any meetings, you won’t miss anything. Recordings are sent to everyone who’s signed up within 48 hours.

Past book clubs

Full recordings of the clubs listed below are available for paid subscribers of this substack. Thank you for helping pay for the storage costs of these large files with your subscription!

• Flannery O’Connor’s stories

• Middlemarch by George Eliot

• Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” and other stories

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

• Mozart’s music

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

• Ernest Hemingway’s short stories and A Farewell to Arms

• Dorothy Parker

Have you ever read “The Lottery”?

Have you ever wondered how Shirley Jackson wrote it, or what she said to outraged/confused readers who wrote letters to her afterwards? Or what the editors at The New Yorker said to their upset readers about the story?

What is this famous short story really about, anyway?

Those are some of the things we covered in the first night of the Shirley Jackson Book Club.

As a thank you to all of FrizzLit’s subscribers here, here is the recording of our first meeting.

If you’re on the fence about signing up, well, now so you can see what it’s like. There are two different ways you can watch:

• Speaker view

• Gallery view

To join the club, just buy a ticket.

We’re discussing the first three sections of The Haunting of Hill House this upcoming Monday.

Join the club

Other upcoming clubs

• Moby Dick, a four-month club (!) that I am leading with novelist Rebecca Brown

• Handel’s Messiah, a classical music club led by Chris Lydgate

Past book clubs

Full recordings of the clubs listed below are available for paid subscribers of this substack. Thank you for helping pay for the storage costs of these large files with your subscription!

• Flannery O’Connor’s stories

• Middlemarch by George Eliot

• Herman Melville’s stories

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

• Mozart’s music

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

• Ernest Hemingway’s short stories and A Farewell to Arms

Join the club

To join the Baldwin book club:

• You need a ticket

• And a copy of the book

Everyone who’s signed up will get an email tomorrow with the reading assignment for Saturday, plus a few discussion questions.

Join the club

Who is leading this class?

Brian Bouldrey is a writer and teaches writing and literature at Northwestern University in Chicago. He has previously led FrizzLit groups on Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy, and short story collections by Anton Chekhov and Flannery O’Connor. Brian is the author of eleven books, most recently, Good in Bed, a collection of essays, and the forthcoming novel The Good Pornographer to be published in March 2026 by University of Wisconsin Press.

Are meetings recorded?

Yes. All meetings are recorded and automatically sent out to all ticketholders — so if you have to miss some (or all) of our live sessions, you won't miss anything.

Past book clubs

If you are a paid subscriber to this substack, you have access to recordings of our past book clubs. Your subscription helps pay for the storage costs of these video archives.

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

• Flannery O’Connor

• Ernest Hemingway’s short stories and A Farewell to Arms

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

• Middlemarch by George Eliot

• Herman Melville’s stories

• Dorothy Parker

• Mozart

  

The fall line-up of FrizzLit clubs has just been announced. Click here to see them.

Show fall book clubs

To join a club, just buy a ticket and get a copy of the book we’re reading.

All clubs meet over Zoom and all meetings are recorded — so if you miss a live meeting, you don’t miss anything.

Brian Bouldrey, a professor of literature and creative writing at Northwestern, will lead the class reading Notes of a Native Son.

As he says in his description of this course, “James Baldwin just turned thirty when he published the 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son, although they would seem to have been written by a wise sage or powerful prophet.”

Join the Baldwin club

Jackson’s genius lies in illuminating the quiet wickedness of the everyday, the nasty neighbors, and the dark desires and secrets that hide in every heart.

In the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James, Jackson had an abiding curiosity about the spiritual realm and how the places people inhabit—and what has been there before—can feel like home or hell.

Join the Shirley Jackson club

Whenever it is a “damp, drizzly November” in Ishmael’s soul, he says at the start of Moby-Dick, “I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

This November, we're going with him. Prepare for a seafaring, heart-pounding, history-haunted adventure that may change your life.

Christopher Frizzelle led the first Moby-Dick book club for FrizzLit back in 2020, an experience he wrote about for the Washington Post. Rebecca Brown led a FrizzLit club reading Herman Melville’s shorter stories — including “Billy Budd” — in 2024.

They will lead this four-month adventure together.

Join the Moby-Dick club

We’ll go backstage and explore Handel’s Messiah from the inside out.

We’ll journey to the boisterous, bawdy, ramshackle landscape of Georgian London. We’ll rub shoulders with Queen Anne, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. We’ll learn how Bart Simpson provides the keys to understanding the Baroque.

We’ll discover Handel’s longshot story as a musical rebel, from child prodigy to college dropout to razzle-dazzle hit machine. We’ll walk with him through stroke and blindness, failure and triumph.

And we’ll drench ourselves in some of the greatest music ever written.

Join the Handel club

Recordings of book clubs past

If you are a paid subscriber to this substack, thank you! Your subscription helps fund the storage costs of the video archives of our past book clubs, which you may enjoy on your own at any time.

They include:

• Flannery O’Connor’s stories

• Middlemarch by George Eliot

• Herman Melville’s stories

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

• Mozart’s music

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

• Ernest Hemingway’s short stories and A Farewell to Arms

Portrait illustrations by Kathryn Rathke

The photo above was taken during the afterparty for the release of FrizzLit Editions’s first book: Nobuko by Trisha Ready.

On the left is book club DJ Suzie Baunsgard, who came up from Portland for the party.

If you weren’t at the party, you may be wondering: Why is Kathryn holding a screwdriver? Unfortunately, that information will not be disclosed. What happens in the Space Lounge stays in the Space Lounge.

The summer-long Joan Didion Book Club starts Monday night!

Discussion questions were sent out yesterday. If you didn’t get those, you’re not signed up.

Sign up

If you sign up now, you will get the discussion questions with your receipt and confirmation.

You will also get the Zoom link and the reading assignment for Monday night at 6 pm, and the list of books you need for this club with your receipt and confirmation.

The Joan Didion Book Club meets on Monday nights starting the first Monday of July.

Join the club

To join the club, just buy a ticket.

After that, you need to get your hands on copies of the books we’re reading. You’ll get more information about what to read before our first meeting once you’re signed up.

Details here.

The Hemingway club starts Saturday!

I’m leading this club with Rebecca Brown, and we sat in her backyard yesterday writing our discussion questions for Saturday’s club, and re-reading the stories we’re going to be talking about, going, “Wow, just… wow.”

Because the writing is incredible.

And Rebecca is a radical feminist lesbian who has no time for the bullshit of men, and who’s made better works of art than you ever will.

And yes, both of us are aware it’s not cool to like Hemingway. It’s not on trend. In fact it’s on trend to want to push him off a cliff and pretend he never existed.

But a literary masterpiece is a literary masterpiece, and he made more than one — and he changed the world.

And the ways he changed the world could change your life — your inner life.

If you’re interested in what makes his work so fucking good,1 or even if you just want to hang out with Rebecca and me and a couple dozen insanely brilliant and funny book club friends, I hope you’ll join us.

To join the club, just buy a ticket.

Join the club

After you join the club, make sure you get copies of the books we’re reading.

The discussion questions and reading assignment will be included with your receipt and confirmation.

Recommended editions

These are the editions we recommend:

• A Farewell to Arms with the author’s drafts and discarded endings

• The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway with the author’s drafts and edits

If you prefer to read other editions, that’s fine too.

Note: this club’s start date was just pushed back to May 3. It was originally going to start this weekend.

To join the club, just buy a ticket.

Join the club

After you join the club, make sure you get copies of the books we’re reading.

Recommended editions

These are the editions we recommend:

• A Farewell to Arms with the author’s drafts and discarded endings

• The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway with the author’s drafts and edits

FrizzLit book club discussion questions about the first five chapters of The Great Gatsby just went out to everyone who’s in the club.

If you didn’t get those, you’re not signed up.

Join the club

We meet this Saturday at 10 am Pacific on Zoom to talk about chapters 1-5, and also to hear the story of Fitzgerald’s life, the real experiences that he turned into fiction, the novel’s surprising publication history, and the thing about the story that the movies get wrong.

To join the club, just buy a ticket.

If you join now, the discussion questions for Saturday will be included with your receipt and confirmation.

In case you’re curious what FrizzLit book clubs are like, here’s our first session of the new E. M. Forster club reading A Room with a View.

We didn’t read anything in advance of this meeting — instead, we got the lay of the land in Florence, Italy, where the opening of the novel is set.

Speaker view

Gallery view

If you’d like to join the club, do it!

There’s still time. We’d love to have you.

To join the club, you need:

• a ticket, so you can get the zoom links and recordings

• a copy of the book

All meetings are recorded and automatically sent to everyone in the club.

We’re reading chapters 1-7 by this coming Monday night.

Join the club

Recommended editions of the book

Past book clubs

For paid subscribers, here are full video archives of past FrizzLit classes:

• Flannery O’Connor

• Middlemarch

• To the Lighthouse

• Great Expectations

These recordings are only available to paid subscribers of this substack, whose subscription fees help cover the costs of storing these recordings.

Have you ever been to Florence? That will be one of the discussion questions for the first night of the E. M. Forster Book Club, because Florence is where the start of the novel is set.

To get all the discussion questions, sign up now and they’ll be included with your receipt and confirmation.

I was just in Florence six months ago, and I have many photos of its marvels, including the Basilica of Santa Croce:

For A Room with a View — which is funny, short, and romantic — we’ll read about 75 pages per week.

Along the way, I’ll share historical context, geographical context, biographical information about the author, and more.

And yes, at our last session, we’ll compare it to the movie starring Helena Bonham Carter and Daniel Day Lewis.

Join the club

To join the club, you need:

• a ticket

• a copy of the book

Recommended editions of the book

Past book clubs

If you’re unfamiliar with these clubs, here are some recordings of past clubs:

• Flannery O’Connor Book Club

• Middlemarch Book Club

• To the Lighthouse Book Club

These recordings are only available to paid subscribers of this substack, whose subscription fees help cover the costs of storing these recordings.

There was a FrizzLit book club reading The Great Gatsby in 2021, and some said it was their favorite club we’ve done.

For the 100th anniversary this April, we’re re-doing that club in a highly condensed form: just two weeks.

All my original research on the author’s life, the historical context of the story, the book’s dismal reception when it was published, and its later rescue from obscurity.

Join the club

Plus the writing, the texture, the symbols and light, the references to Greek mythology and T.S. Eliot, and the thing between the lines that makes the novel newly relevant in 2025.

We start on April 12. More details here.

Join the club

Several people have written to me to ask what the FrizzLit book club reading Dorothy Parker is like.

I’ve decided to make the first session of this class free for all substack subscribers. If you like what you see, there is still time to join the club.

Gallery view

Speaker view

To join the club, buy a ticket and get a copy of this book.

We meet on Zoom on Saturdays at 10 am Pacific for the next month and a half.

All meetings are recorded, and everyone who has a ticket gets the recordings sent to their email within 24 hours of each meeting’s conclusion.

Join the club