This Week at Commonplace.NYC — Oct 25 – Oct 31
2026-10-24
This Week's Book Clubs Oct 25 – Oct 31
If you go to any of these events, take pictures and email them to me so I can add them to the Photo Reel! Happy Halloween!!
Here's what's happening with Commonplace.NYC book clubs this week.
Pirates of Prospect Park: A Treasure Hunt
A The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd themed book club on Pirates of Prospect Park, the annual treasure hunt from Mad Hatchery. Captain William Kidd was a respectable New Yorker with a Wall Street-area home and a pew at Trinity Church before he was hanged for piracy — and Richard Zacks' rollicking history is the source of the buried-treasure legends that still haunt the region. Crews of 3–6, about 3–4 miles of walking, arrival 11–11:30 AM; pay what you can.
Pirates of Prospect Park: A Treasure Hunt: Sunday, Oct 25 · 11:00 AM–3:30 PM EDT — Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY (exact meeting spot shared on registration)
Feng E at The Cutting Room
An afternoon set from Feng E, the Taiwanese ukulele prodigy (b. 2007). He took up the instrument because his fingers developed slowly, practiced because his dad promised Lego afterward, and ended up with a David Foster Golden Buzzer, two Ellen appearances, and an AGT quarterfinal run. Tickets via The Cutting Room; $25 food/drink minimum. Also on Spotify and Instagram. Paired with Gary Marcus's Guitar Zero, in which a cognitive scientist with no musical aptitude teaches himself guitar at 38 and asks whether talent is born, built, or bribed.
Feng E at The Cutting Room: Sunday, Oct 25 · 1:00 PM–3:30 PM EDT — 44 East 32nd St, New York, NY 10016
Shadow of the Unhinged
An Asylums themed book club at Shadow of the Unhinged, a Cantonese-language production (with Chinese and English subtitles) by the Four Seas Players, New York's Chinatown theater company since 1970, at Abrons Arts Center. Erving Goffman's 1961 study of 'total institutions' — the fieldwork that shaped the asylum stories that followed — explains exactly how a ward strips people of who they are, and why one rebel like Ng Ka-Kui terrifies the system so much.
Shadow of the Unhinged: Sunday, Oct 25 · 3:00 PM–5:00 PM EDT — Abrons Arts Center, Underground Theater, 466 Grand St, New York, NY 10002
Shadow of the Unhinged: Friday, Oct 30 · 8:00 PM–10:00 PM EDT — Abrons Arts Center, Underground Theater, 466 Grand St, New York, NY 10002
Shadow of the Unhinged: Saturday, Oct 31 · 3:00 PM–5:00 PM EDT — Abrons Arts Center, Underground Theater, 466 Grand St, New York, NY 10002
Shadow of the Unhinged: Saturday, Oct 31 · 7:00 PM–9:00 PM EDT — Abrons Arts Center, Underground Theater, 466 Grand St, New York, NY 10002
Full Moon Gowanus Voyage
A full-moon guided canoe voyage with the Gowanus Dredgers, launching from their new South Gowanus Bunker at the end of 19th St (not the 2nd St boathouse). The route heads toward the 9th St bridge and back as the moon rises over the harbor lights. Paired with The Bottom of the Harbor, the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell's 1959 collection on oystermen, rat-infested piers, and the old waterfront people who knew New York's water as a living place long before the EPA got involved. Tickets required; may cancel for weather by 3:30pm.
Full Moon Gowanus Voyage: Sunday, Oct 25 · 5:30 PM–7:30 PM EDT — 2 19th St, Brooklyn, NY 11232
The Poems of Sylvia Plath: Amanda Golden
A lecture and conversation at NYU English with Professor Amanda Golden, moderated by Patrick Deer, on making The Poems of Sylvia Plath (2026), the new definitive edition co-edited with Karen V. Kukil. It nearly doubles the 1981 Collected Poems and traces her arc from childhood verse to the molten late work. Paired with Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, a ruthless look at how biographers, editors, and estates fight over who gets to shape a dead poet. It's the perfect counterweight to an evening about editorial authority.
The Poems of Sylvia Plath: Amanda Golden: Monday, Oct 26 · 5:00 PM–6:00 PM EDT — 244 Greene Street #106, New York, NY 10003
FNL: Intimate Thresholds with Laura Vogt & Nicole Krauss
Festival Neue Literatur's conversation between Swiss novelist Laura Vogt (Woman, Idle, trans. Caroline Waight) and Nicole Krauss (To Be a Man), moderated by translator Tess Lewis. They'll take up desire, history's pull on longing, and why grief is so creatively generative. RSVP required. Paired with Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina (1971), the Austrian classic of a woman's identity dissolving between two men. It's the German-language ancestor of Vogt's silent woman in the mountains.
FNL: Intimate Thresholds with Laura Vogt & Nicole Krauss: Monday, Oct 26 · 6:00 PM–7:30 PM EDT — 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003
Dungeons & Drafts One-Shot
A Dungeons & Drafts D&D 5e one-shot at New York Beer Dispensary with GM Jake G. Pre-made characters and everything else are provided, and all levels are welcome. Paired with C. Thi Nguyen's Games: Agency as Art (2020), which argues games are the art form whose medium is agency itself. A pre-made character sheet is a borrowed way of wanting things, and trying one on for an evening is the point.
Dungeons & Drafts One-Shot: Monday, Oct 26 · 6:30 PM–10:00 PM EDT — 223 W 14th St, New York, NY 10011
Greek Dancing Lessons
An eight-week Greek Dancing Group Lessons series at the Greek Cultural Center with instructor Vaia Vlamis-Sparakis. It covers regional dances from Asia Minor and rebetika to Epirus, Thrace, Pontus, and the islands. $80 total, check or cash preferred, paid by the first class. Paired with Gail Holst's Road to Rembetika (1975), the pioneering English-language study of rebetiko. It follows the hashish-den music of refugees from the 1922 Asia Minor catastrophe, and the dances that carried exile, defiance, and grief into Greek popular culture.
Greek Dancing Lessons (1/8): Tuesday, Oct 27 · 6:00 PM–7:00 PM EDT — Greek Cultural Center, 26-80 30th St, Astoria, NY 11102
Rough Draft: Skin to Skin
Skin to Skin: Triptych of an American Epidemic at LPAC's Rough Draft Festival, a work in progress by Jeremy J. Kamps and Trixie Ndanu Kioko with Houses on the Moon Theater Company. It centers Black women's experiences of health, care, and survival, and who gets heard by the institutions that filter their pain. The Oct 28 matinee is followed by a talkback moderated by Aaliytha Stevens. Free RSVP, or a $25 supporter ticket or $50 festival pass. Paired with Linda Villarosa's Under the Skin (2022), a New York Times journalist's account of how racism, not race, gets into Black Americans' bodies through weathering, maternal mortality, and medicine's inherited myths.
Rough Draft: Skin to Skin: Tuesday, Oct 27 · 7:00 PM–8:30 PM EDT — LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, 31-10 Thomson Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101
Rough Draft: Skin to Skin (Matinee + Talkback): Wednesday, Oct 28 · 2:30 PM–4:30 PM EDT — LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, 31-10 Thomson Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101
Divestment Happy Hour
Divestment Happy Hour, the Solar Punk Farms party hosted by Climate Farm School with Walden Mutual Bank and Webatuck Valley Farm Collaborative. Move your money out of big banks over snacks, open a checking, savings, or CD that backs Webatuck's food hub line of credit, and stamp something at the woodblock station. $35. Use code CFSALUMNI by 10/31 with a $100+ deposit to trigger $50 donations to each nonprofit (terms). Email [email protected] to stay for dinner (get the grilled onigiri). Paired with Mehrsa Baradaran's How the Other Half Banks (2015), a history of how American banking abandoned its public bargain and what mutual, community, and postal alternatives could look like.
Divestment Happy Hour: Wednesday, Oct 28 · 5:30 PM–8:00 PM EDT — Rule of Thirds, 171 Banker St, Brooklyn, NY 11222
PhotoWork Symposium at Aperture
The inaugural PhotoWork Symposium at Aperture, where 2025 Senior Fellows Michelle Arcila, Will Matsuda, and José Ibarra Rizo present fellowship work, then discuss process with their mentors Ron Jude, Raymond Meeks, and Kristine Potter. The fellowship covers the whole journey toward a first photobook: conception, editing, sequencing, design, and distribution. At capacity; email [email protected] for the waitlist. Paired with Stephen Shore's The Nature of Photographs, a slim primer on how a picture's physical, depictive, and mental levels work. It's the quiet grammar underneath every edit those mentors will talk about.
PhotoWork Symposium at Aperture: Wednesday, Oct 28 · 6:30 PM–8:30 PM EDT — Aperture, 380 Columbus Avenue, New York, NY 10024
Papers We Love: Learning Rules (Gold 1967)
Papers We Love NYC with Stony Brook linguistics PhD student Abed Qaddoumi (Scholar) on what math can tell us about language. The talk runs from Cashinahua kinship as the symmetries of a square, through finite-state phonology, to Gold's Language Identification in the Limit (1967) and Kleinberg & Mullainathan's Language Generation in the Limit (2024), which explains why generating valid language can succeed where identifying it can't. Host approval required. Paired with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater's The Language Game (2022). Gold's result was long used to argue grammar must be innate; this book argues language is learnable improvised charades instead. That makes it a sharp counterpoint for the Q&A.
Papers We Love: Learning Rules (Gold 1967): Wednesday, Oct 28 · 6:30 PM–8:30 PM EDT — Mindspace Williamsburg, 25 Kent Ave, Suite 401, Brooklyn, NY 11249
Rough Draft: MAMA/RUN
MAMA/RUN at LPAC's Rough Draft Festival, Lester Eugene Mayers's piece of poetry, movement, and ritual about what we inherit from our mothers when love and absence share the same room. It returns as a workshop after its spring 2026 reading. The Oct 29 matinee includes a talkback with LaGuardia professor Jermaine Rowe. Free RSVP or $25 supporter ticket. Paired with Kiese Laymon's Heavy: An American Memoir (2018), written directly to his mother. It's a book about the body, inheritance, and the lies families tell to survive, and it reads almost like a script for MAMA/RUN.
Rough Draft: MAMA/RUN: Wednesday, Oct 28 · 7:00 PM–8:30 PM EDT — LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, 31-10 Thomson Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101
Rough Draft: MAMA/RUN (Matinee + Talkback): Thursday, Oct 29 · 2:30 PM–4:30 PM EDT — LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, 31-10 Thomson Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101
AAA Stargazing: WNYC Transmitter Park
Free Amateur Astronomers Association stargazing on the pier at WNYC Transmitter Park in Greenpoint, weather permitting. It's on the site where the city's public radio towers once stood, with Manhattan glowing across the river. Paired with Paul Bogard's The End of Night (2013), which travels from the brightest city on earth to the darkest skies left. The book asks what we lose, ecologically, medically, and spiritually, when we light away the stars. It's a fitting read for squinting at Saturn through the East River glare.
AAA Stargazing: WNYC Transmitter Park: Thursday, Oct 29 · 6:30 PM–8:00 PM EDT — WNYC Transmitter Park, West St & Greenpoint Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11222
Rough Draft: FURBALL (+ Talkback)
FURBALL at LPAC's Rough Draft Festival, Jeana Scotti's funny, strange comedy directed by Tara Elliott. It's about the private anxieties and contradictions people with vaginas carry about sex, relationships, and their own bodies. The Oct 29 show has a talkback with LaGuardia professor James Caldwell. Free RSVP or $25 supporter ticket. Paired with Rachel E. Gross's Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage (2022), a witty science-journalism tour of how medicine ignored half of human anatomy for centuries. It reads like the nonfiction appendix to every question FURBALL is too polite to footnote.
Rough Draft: FURBALL (+ Talkback): Thursday, Oct 29 · 7:00 PM–9:00 PM EDT — LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, 31-10 Thomson Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101
Rough Draft: FURBALL: Friday, Oct 30 · 7:00 PM–8:30 PM EDT — LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, 31-10 Thomson Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101
KINTSUGI x NextJump
A Kintsugi Gather at Next Jump led by Bianca Valencia Criscuolo and Esther Mun. Mend a provided broken ceramic with gold (please don't break anything to bring), share personal reflections, and stay for sushi, cocktails, and a DJ. $85; a QR code arrives the day before and is required for entry. Paired with Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey's An Everyone Culture (2016), which profiles Next Jump itself as one of three deliberately developmental organizations. Their thesis is kintsugi applied to work: stop hiding your weaknesses, and make the seams visible so they become where growth happens.
KINTSUGI x NextJump: Thursday, Oct 29 · 7:00 PM–9:00 PM EDT — 512 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011
Capture the Future
Capture the Future, a phone-free Halloweekend game of giant capture the flag in Prospect Park, with quests, intrigue, and plenty of insider trading. The Oracle is not happy about prediction markets taking over the world. It's a closed container: arrive at 7pm sharp at the Flatbush carousel entrance and stay until the game ends at 9pm, then hang loose in the spooky park. Costumes encouraged, but wear something you can run in and bring a headlamp. Paired with Ian Hacking's The Taming of Chance (1990), the philosopher's history of how the 19th century's avalanche of numbers turned fate into statistics. It answers exactly when we traded ambiguous prophecy for quantified probability, and what that did to how we think about people.
Capture the Future: Friday, Oct 30 · 7:00 PM–10:00 PM EDT — Prospect Park, Flatbush Ave Carousel Entrance, Brooklyn, NY
Creatures of the Night: Rocky Horror Shadow Cast
Creatures of the Night, an all-QPOC drag, burlesque, and sideshow shadow cast of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Coney Island USA. Janet is a comedic drag queen, Rocky swallows swords, and the Time Warp's jump to the left lands on a pile of glass. Featuring Junior Mintt, Queerly Femmetastic (Miss Coney Island 2026), Foxy Belle Afriq & Uncle Freak, and more. $30, will-call only; 18+; ASL interpreted. Paired with Leslie Fiedler's Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (1978), a wild critical history of the sideshow. It argues that our fascination with freaks is really about the unstable borders of sex, self, and humanity, which is Frank-N-Furter's whole thesis.
Creatures of the Night: Rocky Horror Shadow Cast: Friday, Oct 30 · 8:00 PM–10:00 PM EDT — Coney Island USA, 1208 Surf Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11224
The Planets: New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra
New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra under guest conductor Matthew Oberstein at St. Paul & St. Andrew. Violist Matthew Lipman plays William Walton's lyrical Viola Concerto, followed by Holst's The Planets, Op. 32. Paired with Dava Sobel's The Planets (2005), which gives each world its own chapter told through myth, astrology, science, and even a letter from Galileo's daughter. It's a literary suite that runs alongside Holst's movement by movement.
The Planets: New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra: Friday, Oct 30 · 8:00 PM–10:00 PM EDT — St. Paul & St. Andrew, 263 W 86th St, New York, NY 10024
Apolloween at The Apollo
Apolloween, a free interactive haunted house in the Laura and Frank Baker Gallery that brings the legends and ghosts of the Apollo's history to life. RSVP required; enter at 238 W 126th St. Paired with Ted Fox's Showtime at the Apollo, the definitive history of the Harlem landmark, from Ella Fitzgerald's amateur-night debut to the Executioner sweeping acts off stage. Ideally read the 2019 graphic-novel adaptation with James Otis Smith, which suits a haunted afternoon.
Apolloween at The Apollo: Saturday, Oct 31 · 2:00 PM–4:00 PM EDT — 238 West 126th Street, New York, NY 10027
¡Viva Pinocho! A Mexican Pinocchio
A Signs Preceding the End of the World themed book club at ¡Viva Pinocho!, Teatro SEA's bilingual Mexican Pinocchio written by Manuel Antonio Morán — a wooden boy born in Mexico who dreams of crossing to 'The Other Side' with the blessing of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Yuri Herrera's short, mythic novel sends a young woman across the border on a quest like a journey through the underworld, and asks the same question as the play: what do you keep of yourself on the way?
¡Viva Pinocho! A Mexican Pinocchio: Saturday, Oct 31 · 3:00 PM–4:00 PM EDT — Teatro SEA, 107 Suffolk St, New York, NY 10002
Want to start your own book club? Here's a guide. See the full schedule any time at https://www.commonplace.nyc.
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