# Event Details - **Event Name**: Symposium Book Club "Pew" - **Event Start and End Date**: Thu, 10 Sep, 2026 at 06:00 pm – Thu, 10 Sep, 2026 at 07:00 pm (-04:00) - **Event Description**: Join us in our group discussion of Catherine Lacey's novel "Pew"!About this EventJoin us on September 10th at 6pm for our monthly book club! We'll be reading Catherine Lacey's novel Pew! Copies are available to purchase in-store and on our website!About the book:WINNER of the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Finalist for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize. Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. One of Publishers Weekly's Best Fiction Books of 2020. One of Amazon's 100 Best Books of 2020.“The people of this community are stifling, and generous, cruel, earnest, needy, overconfident, fragile and repressive, which is to say that they are brilliantly rendered by their wise maker, Catherine Lacey.” --Rachel Kushner, author of The FlamethrowersA figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzyIn a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew.As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of who they really are—a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths.Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters’ true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.About the AuthorCatherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, the short story collection Certain American States, and The Möbius Book. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Library Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a Lambda Literary Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. - **Event URL**: https://allevents.in/providence/symposium-book-club-pew/100001998692634473 - **Event Categories**: art, literary-art, festivals - **Interested Audience**: - total_interested_count: 0 ## Ticket Details - **Ticket Price Range**: min: 0, max: 0, currency: USD ## Event venue details - **city**: Providence - **state**: RI - **country**: United States - **location**: Symposium Books - **lat**: 41.82277029999999 - **long**: -71.4125449 - **full address**: Symposium Books, 240 Westminster Street, Providence, United States ## Event gallery - **Alt text**: Symposium Book Club "Pew" - **Image URL**: https://cdn-az.allevents.in/events1/banners/09b9c7704140a9578f5f926915fbdef7b211990ac0d105066ca6fe59ca192cfb-rimg-w1080-h1080-dc487858-gmir.jpg?v=1787806847 ## FAQs - **Q**: When and where is Symposium Book Club "Pew" being held? - **A:** Symposium Book Club "Pew" takes place on Thu, 10 Sep, 2026 at 06:00 pm to Thu, 10 Sep, 2026 at 07:00 pm at Symposium Books, 240 Westminster Street, Providence, United States. - **Q**: Who is organizing Symposium Book Club "Pew"? - **A:** Symposium Book Club "Pew" is organized by Symposium Books Staff. - **Q**: Who is this event for? Is it right for me? - **A:** Symposium Book Club "Pew" is ideal for art lovers, collectors, creatives, and anyone inspired by visual arts, installations, and exhibitions. Whether you're a first-time attendee or a longtime enthusiast in Providence, this event is thoughtfully curated to deliver a standout experience worth every moment. If Symposium Book Club "Pew" sounds like your kind of event, don't wait - spots fill up fast. ## Structured Data (JSON-LD) ```json [ { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Event", "name": "Symposium Book Club "Pew"", "image": "https://cdn-az.allevents.in/events1/banners/09b9c7704140a9578f5f926915fbdef7b211990ac0d105066ca6fe59ca192cfb-rimg-w1080-h1080-dc487858-gmir.jpg?v=1787806847", "startDate": "2026-09-10T18:00:00-04:00", "endDate": "2026-09-10T19:00:00-04:00", "url": "https://allevents.in/providence/symposium-book-club-pew/100001998692634473", "eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventScheduled", "location": { "@type": "Place", "name": "Symposium Books", "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "streetAddress": "240 Westminster Street", "postalCode": "02903", "addressLocality": "Providence", "addressRegion": "RI", "addressCountry": "US" }, "geo": { "@type": "GeoCoordinates", "latitude": "41.82277029999999", "longitude": "-71.4125449" } }, "eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/OfflineEventAttendanceMode", "description": "Join us in our group discussion of Catherine Lacey's novel \"Pew\"!", "offers": [ { "@type": "AggregateOffer", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock", "priceCurrency": "USD", "availabilityStarts": "2026-08-27", "availabilityEnds": "2026-09-10T19:00:00-04:00", "validFrom": "2026-08-27", "lowPrice": "0.00", "highPrice": "0.00", "price": "0.00", "url": "https://allevents.in/providence/symposium-book-club-pew/100001998692634473" }, { "@type": "Offer", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock", "priceCurrency": "USD", "availabilityStarts": "2026-08-27", "availabilityEnds": "", "validFrom": "2026-08-27", "url": "https://allevents.in/providence/symposium-book-club-pew/100001998692634473", "price": 0, "name": "General Admission" } ], "organizer": [ { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Symposium Books Staff", "url": "https://allevents.in/org/symposium-books-staff/24111490", "description": "Symposium Books is a small, independent bookstore located in Downtown Providence. Having a deep-standing position in the local community, we focus on lifting up local writers and other artists with our organized events. Our author talks provide a little insight into the creative process of those around us, and give the community a space to connect and be curious." } ] } ] ```