Welcome to One Bright Book! Join our hosts Rebecca, Frances, and Dorian as they discuss THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE by Gloria Naylor and chat about their current reading.

For our next episode, we will discuss OPEN SECRETS: STORIES by Alice Munro, weighing the value of her work against what we have recently learned of her personal life. We would love to have you read along with us, and join us for our conversation coming to you in May.

Want to support the show? Visit us at Bookshop.org or click on the links below and buy some books!

Buy our book! Support the show by buying a copy of Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Marsh Island, with an afterword by us.

Books mentioned:

• The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor
• Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor
• The Men of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• Instead of a Letter by Diana Athill
• Transcendence for Beginners: Life Writing and Philosophy by Clare Carlisle
• There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib
• The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated from the Dutch by Martin Aitken
• The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, translated from the Dutch by David McKay
• The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre, translated from the Italian by Antonella Lettieri
• The Witch by Marie Ndiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump
• Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab
• Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
• The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley
• An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge
• Nonesuch by Francis Spufford
• Sakina’s Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag, translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur
• Open Secrets: Stories by Alice Munro
• A Marsh Island by Sarah Orne Jewett, with an afterword from the One Bright Book crew.

You may also be interested in:

The National Book Critics Circle Awards

Hanif Abdurraqib on Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place

Welcome to One Bright Book! Join our hosts Dorian, Rebecca, and Frances as they discuss THE WAY WE LIVE NOW by Anthony Trollope and chat about their current reading.

For our next episode, we will discuss ORLANDO by Virginia Woolf, the “joyful romp,” the “escapade” that might have you thinking of the author in a new way. We would love to have you read along with us, and join us for our conversation coming to you around the end of February.

Want to support the show? Visit us at Bookshop.org or click on the links below and buy some books!

Books mentioned:

• The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
• Domestic Manners of the Americans by Fanny Trollope
• The Chronicles of Barsetshire by Anthony Trollope
• The Palliser Novels by Anthony Trollope
• An Autobiography by Anthony Trollope
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• The Transylvanian Trilogy by Mikos Banffy
• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
• A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled by Alex Green
• Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly
• Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs
• Head of a Traveler by Nicholas Blake
• Orlando by Virginia Woolf

You may also be interested in:

The National Book Critics Circle Awards

Welcome to One Bright Book! Join our hosts Dorian, Rebecca, and Frances as they discuss their most anticipated books of 2026 with Sam Sacks, prominent book critic for The Wall Street Journal, writing the weekly “Fiction Chronicle,” and a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly.

For our next episode, we will discuss The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope. We would love to have you read along with us, and join us for our conversation coming to you in late January.

Want to support the show? Visit us at Bookshop.org or click on the links below and buy some books!

Books mentioned:

• The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale
• In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale
• Opus Siniestra by Leonora Carrington
• On the Calculation of Volume, Book IV by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
• Incompleteness: New and Selected Essays, 1999-2023 by Amit Chaudhuri
• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
• This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin
• Now I Surrender by Alvaro Enrique, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
• You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrique, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
• The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley
• My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
• First Love by Gwendoline Riley
• Ambivalence by Brian Dillon
• Transcendence for Beginners by Clare Carlisle
• Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir
• Here Where We Live Is Our Country by Molly Crabapple
• Down Time by Andrew Martin
• Early Work by Andrew Martin
• Cool for America by Andrew Martin
• On Morrison by Namwali Serpell
• The Witch by Marie Ndiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump
• That Time of Year by Marie Ndiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump
• Twenty Minutes of Silence by Helene Bessette, translated from the French by Kate Briggs
• Lilli Is Crying by Helene Bessette, translated from the French by Kate Briggs
• The Queen of Swords by Jazmina Barrera, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
• The Week of Colors by Elena Garro, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
• Nonesuch by Francis Spufford
• Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford
• The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading by Francis Spufford
• The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
• A Marsh Island by Sarah Orne Jewett
• The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

Welcome to One Bright Book! Rebecca and Frances move out of the picture for this bonus episode where Dorian gets a chance to finally discuss VANITY FAIR by William Makepeace Thackeray with his one time professor and always friend, Rohan Maitzen. A rare and special opportunity to revisit the book from the syllabus that he blew off reading. “You can never entirely escape your sins!” Ready for some time well-spent in the 19th century?

Find Rohan’s blog Novel Readings here.

Want to support the show? Visit us at Bookshop.org or click on the links below and buy some books!

Books mentioned:

• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
• The Warden by Anthony Trollope
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• The Heart of Midlothian by Sir Walter Scott
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
• Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
• Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
• The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
• Villette by Charlotte Bronte
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Special thanks to Fred the Cat for the special background symphony