Read with APS Together.
Discover a different way to book club.
APS Together reimagines the book club. It has three guiding principles: We read daily. We read slowly, a half-hour each day. We read imaginatively, miscellaneously, individually. A different writer serves as the host for each book, and every morning they share observations and reflections on that day’s pages. APS Together readers (we hope that will include you!) contribute their own comments and questions throughout the day. We read mostly novels, and occasionally short-story collections and poetry; most APS Together book clubs last about two weeks. At the end of each book club, the host joins A Public Space editor Brigid Hughes for a conversation on Zoom.
APS Together was established in March 2020, with a collective reading of War and Peace hosted by Yiyun Li. (Tolstoy Together compiled that experience into a book, which you can find here). Since then, Garth Greenwell, Elizabeth McCracken, Ed Park, Aimee Bender, Carl Phillips, Dorthe Nors, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Paul Lisicky, Idra Novey, Lynn Steger Strong, and Lan Samantha Chang, among others, have served as APS Together hosts. We’ve read books by Henry James, Natalia Ginzburg, James Baldwin, Jane Bowles, Charles Portis, Wisława Szymborska, William Maxwell, Qiu Miaojin, Machado de Assis, Jane Austen, and more. APS Together originally took place on Twitter, but starting in 2023, we’re reading together here on Substack. You can find the APS Together archive on A Public Space’s website here.
Continue reading with A Public Space.
A Public Space publishes a literary and arts magazine three times a year. It’s been called a “cabinet of curiosities,” and brings together contemporary writers, work in translation, and overlooked work from the past. An issue might include a story by Jhumpa Lahiri alongside a seventh-century poem translated from the Arabic. You might be introduced to the work of writers like Ada Zhang and Edward McWhinney. Or encounter the artist Dorothea Tanning’s journals, Jamel Brinkley’s debut story, Deborah Taffa’s memoir of the Yuma Nation, Robert Sullivan’s portrait of the Meadowlands, John Haskell’s film essays, Claire Messud’s family history.
Subscriptions to the magazine include three issues as well as access to the magazine’s archive, discounts on A Public Space Books, and invitations to special events throughout the year. You can subscribe here.
A Public Space Books expands on the magazine’s mission to actively seek out imaginative, ambitious, and singular work, across languages, generations, and realms. You can find our full list of titles including books by Giorgio de Chirico, John L’Heureux, Bette Howland, Friederike Mayröcker, Mark Hage, Annie Coggan, and Arinze Ifeakandu, here. To stay up to date on news from A Public Space, including new issues of the magazine, forthcoming titles, open calls for submissions, online classes and workshops, and more—sign up for our newsletter here.
