Reading Groups

Exploring the Daylong Novel: Fiction Set in a Single Day with Sam Rutter

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5 sessions Mondays, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT October 27, 2025 to January 26, 2026

Online via Zoom

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The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at an additional 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
10/27, 11/10, 12/8, 1/5, 1/26
Online via Zoom

An entire lifetime can be squeezed into a day, a night, or even a moment:

James Joyce was onto something when he condensed Odysseus’s journey of twenty years into a single day in Ulysses. Haruki Murakami’s After Dark is a surreal caper through the streets of a nocturnal Tokyo. Samantha Harvey takes us into space for a day in Orbital. The feverish deathbed confessions of a complicit priest animate the pages of Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile. Bernadette Mayer’s extraordinary epic of the ordinary is a book-length poem that squashes time into itself, depicting just one day. And in The Mezzanine, America’s polymath, Nicholson Baker, treats us to the euphoria of the everyday in the time it takes his protagonist to take an escalator in a mall..

All these books reduce time and writing to a ticking clock—but just how does it tick, and for whom?

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Please read After Dark by Haruki Murakami in its entirety.

What to expect from this reading group: This course will be conversational and reader-driven. No expert knowledge is assumed, and all questions will be appreciated!

Reading List:

After Dark by Haruki Murakami
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño
Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Samuel Rutter

Samuel Rutter

Samuel Rutter is a writer and translator from Melbourne, Australia. His work can be found in Harper’s magazine, the Paris Review, the White Review, and the Telegraph, and he is a regular contributor to T: The New York Times Style Magazine. He is the editor-in-chief of Kismet, a new literary magazine of religion, spirituality, and mysticism.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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