NOVEMBER 2025
OPEN WIDE
by Jessica Gross
Available from Abrams Books
Sign-up deadline for this title: October 15, 2025
​​
An increasingly obsessive radio host tests the boundaries of her boyfriend's love in this unforgettable dark comedy that is by turns romantic, horrific, and profound.
"Raising interesting questions about boundaries within relationships . . . the novel literalizes the romantic trope of becoming one with your partner, while ingeniously satirizing female neediness. There is a predatory nature to Olive’s possessiveness—or is that love? A rom-com inside a body horror story, or a philosophical examination of love as obsession." —Kirkus (starred review)
Olive is desperate to get close to Theo—really, really close. She’s always struggled to connect with people. And now she’s in her thirties, single, and so flustered by relationships that she secretly records her conversations, hoping to decipher social cues and find a way to be less alone.
Then Theo turns up for a shift at the same food pantry where she volunteers. He’s a surgeon fascinated by human organs, a former soccer player, and possibly as weird as Olive.
For the first time, someone seems to crave and understand her. Every recording of Theo is a balm, which just makes Olive more afraid of losing him. The only solution seems to be to bind him to her forever. Luckily, the gap between Theo’s front teeth is just wide enough for something—or someone—to slip inside.
Arresting and immersive, Open Wide explores the complexities of intimacy, love and consent, as universal human impulses bleed into the surreal.
​
DECEMBER 2025:
A SILENT TREATMENT, by Jeannie Vanasco (Tin House)
Sign-up deadline: November 15, 2025
​
"Unspeakably compelling."―Ed Park
​
“A Silent Treatment confronts both the complexity of family and the quandary of capturing a family’s shapeshifting and perplexing love, their truthful and devoted love, in the amber of memoir.” ―Megha Majumdar
She did it to my dad, though. They used the silent treatment on each other, she explained, because they didn't want to say something they'd regret.
What does she want to say now that she'd regret?
Jeannie Vanasco’s mother starts using the silent treatment not long after moving into the renovated apartment within Jeannie’s home. The silences begin at any perceived slight. Her shortest period of silence lasts two weeks. Her longest, six months. As Vanasco guides us through her mother’s childhood, their shared past, and the devastating silence of their present, she paints a layered, complicated portrait of a mother and daughter looking, failing, and―in big and small ways―succeeding to understand each other. In the margins of her research, at her kitchen table with her partner, in phone calls to friends, and in delightful hey google queries, Vanasco explores the loneliness and isolation of silence as punishment, both in her own life and beyond it, and confronts her greatest fear: that her mother will never speak to her again.
From the acclaimed author of Things We Didn’t Talk About When I was a Girl and The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco’s A Silent Treatment is a searingly honest and lasting testament to the power of all things left unsaid.
.
JOIN THE CLUB!
-
Only $9.99 per month. Less than the cost of a book.
-
U.S. & Canada only. ​
-
All Book Club authors are interviewed on the podcast.
-
Click below and sign up safely and securely.
-
PayPal and major credit cards accepted.