Previous Events
Classics Book Club
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
An in-person discussion led by Dr. Larry Allums
Wednesday, November 6, 2024
7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Witty and poignant, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is often cited as the preeminent “Great American Novel.” So join this willful vagabond as he sails down the Mighty Mississippi and discovers one thrilling adventure followed by another.
Ayşegül Savaş in Dallas
Friday, October 25, 2024
7:00 p.m.
Dallas Contemporary
Join us for an exciting discussion with Aysegül about her new book The Anthropologists. The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of homebuilding and modern love. Book signing to follow with books available for purchase from Deep Vellum.
"The Anthropologists is mesmerizing; I felt I read it in a single breath." -Garth Greenwell
Aysegül Savas is the author of the acclaimed novels Walking on the Ceiling and White on White. Her work has been translated into six languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. She lives in Paris.
Pen America Author’s Evening with
Alan Govenar
Tuesday, September 24th, 2024 6:30pm
Alan Govenar is an award-winning writer, folklorist, photographer, and filmmaker. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and has written more than 25 books including Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound, Everyday Music, and Boccaccio in the Berkshires. His book Osceola: Memories of a Sharecropper’s Daughter won first place in the New York Book Festival, a Boston Globe-Hornbook Honor, and an Orbis Pictus Honor from the National Council of Teachers of English. Govenar’s film Stoney Knows How: Life as a Tattoo Artist was an Outstanding Film of the Year at the London Film Festival. Govenar is the president of Documentary Arts, Inc. He founded this nonprofit organization in 1985 with the aim to present new perspectives on historical issues and diverse cultures. Located in East Dallas, Documentary Arts has an active role in the arts, organizing numerous exhibitions, installations and public programs.
Book Club
Colm Tóibín’s Long Island
An in-person discussion led by Dr. Larry Allums
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
From the beloved, critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Ellis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work, twenty years later.
A Virtual Conversation with Isabel Allende
Tuesday, July 23rd, 2024
4:00 p.m. PST / 6:00 p.m. CST
Join a Dallas Literary Society exclusive interview with literary icon Isabel Allende as we get a glimpse into Allende‘s life and her stories. Isabel Allende is one of the most widely-read authors in the world, She has written 26 books and sold more than 77 million books. Her works entertain and educate readers by interweaving imaginative stories with significant historical events. She has won numerous awards including fifteen honorary doctorates and the PEN Center Lifetime Achievement Award.
Classics Book Club
Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse
An in-person discussion led by Dr. Larry Allums
Friday, June 7th, 2024
7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century for its literary technique, the story focuses on the inner lives of the Ramsay family and explores the many complexities of the human condition. Please click here to view the edition we will be using.
A Virtual Conversation with Aanchal Malhotra
Saturday, April 27th, 2024
9:30 a.m. CST / 8:00 p.m. IST
Join a Dallas Literary Society exclusive conversation with writer Aanchal Malhotra as she gives us a glimpse into the search for personal stories, her writing process, and much more.
About Aanchal: Known for her works on the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, she won the Council for Museum Anthropology Book Award for Remnants of a Separation, and her book In the Language of Remembering was named one of History Today’s Best Books of the Year.
Pen America Author’s Evening with
Elizabeth Crook
Wednesday, April 24th, 2024 6:30pm
Elizabeth Crook was born in Houston, Texas. She graduated from Rice University in 1982. She has written four novels: The Raven’s Bride, which was the 2006 Texas Reads One Book selection; Promised Lands; The Night Journal, winner of the 2007 Spur Award for Best Western Long Novel and the 2007 Willa Literary Award for Historical Fiction; and Monday, Monday, which was awarded the 2015 Jesse H. Jones award for fiction. Elizabeth has written for periodicals such as Texas Monthly and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. She is a member of Women Writing the West, Western Writers of America, and the Philosophical Society of Texas, and was selected the honored writer for 2006 Texas Writers’ Month.
Pen America Author’s Evening with
Alan Govenar
Monday March 4th, 2024 6:30pm
Alan Govenar is an award-winning writer, folklorist, photographer, and filmmaker. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and has written more than 25 books including Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound, Everyday Music, and Boccaccio in the Berkshires. His book Osceola: Memories of a Sharecropper’s Daughter won first place in the New York Book Festival, a Boston Globe-Hornbook Honor, and an Orbis Pictus Honor from the National Council of Teachers of English. Govenar’s film Stoney Knows How: Life as a Tattoo Artist was an Outstanding Film of the Year at the London Film Festival. Govenar is the president of Documentary Arts, Inc. He founded this nonprofit organization in 1985 with the aim to present new perspectives on historical issues and diverse cultures. Located in East Dallas, Documentary Arts has an active role in the arts, organizing numerous exhibitions, installations and public programs.
B.Y.O.B.B.
Bring Your Own Banned Book
Wednesday, February 21, 2024 6:30pm
Join Dallas Literary Society in a discussion of books that have been banned through the centuries.
An intimate conversation with
Ben Fountain
Friday, February 9th, 2024 6:30pm
Ben Fountain was born in Chapel Hill and grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina. A former practicing attorney, he is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and the novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Billy Lynn was adapted into a feature film directed by three-time Oscar winner Ang Lee, and his work has been translated into over twenty languages. His series of essays published in The Guardian on the 2016 U.S. presidential election was subsequently nominated by the editors of The Guardian for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. He is the 2024 winner of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize that will transport him to a residency at UC Berkeley this fall. He lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife of 32 years, Sharon Fountain.
The MacMillan Institute presents
The Moby Dick Marathon
December 28-29, 2023
4:00 pm until we are through
The Mac, 518 East Wheatland Road, Duncanville, Texas
Join the epic adventure to read the entirety of Moby-Dick. The event begins at 4:00 p.m. on December 28 and runs for approximately twenty-two hours! Sign up to read if you dare, or come and listen. You do not need to stay the whole time…
A special, invitation-only event
DLS Bookclub
Friday, November 17th
Private Residence in Dallas, Texas
In partnership with the University of Texas at Dallas Center for Asian Studies, a conversation with
Jai Chakrabarti
Wednesday, October 11, 2023
Jonsson Performance Hall (JO 2.604) in the Erik Jonsson Academic Center (JO) at UT Dallas
Jai Chakrabarti is the author of a story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Knopf ’23). He is also the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf ’21), which won a National Jewish Book Award, was the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, was short-listed for the Rabindranath Tagore Prize, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His short fiction has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, awarded a Pushcart Prize and performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space. He was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space, received an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College and is a trained computer scientist. Born in Kolkata, India, he now lives in New York with his family.
