Produced in partnership with Belletrist Book Club.
Since 2017, Belletrist Book Club has chosen more than 75 titles for the book club and dozens more for myriad content features across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and the newsletter The Belletrist Brief. In 2019, Emma Roberts and Karah Priess spun out Belletrist Book Club into a production company called Belletrist Productions.
Annie Hamilton is a writer and performer from New York City.
Laura Harrier is an actress and model. Her screen credits include Spider-Man: Homecoming, BlacKkKlansman, for which she was nominated for a Black Reel Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, Hollywood, Mike, Entergalactic, White Men Can’t Jump, and Michael.
Will Harrison is best known for his recent work in Daisy Jones & The Six on Amazon Prime. Additional film and television credits include Venefica, In Arms, Madam Secretary, This Is a Film About My Mother, Manhunt, and A Complete Unknown. He recently starred in Hulu’s true crime series Murdaugh: Death In The Family.
Tania James is the author of Atlas of Unknowns and Aerogrammes (both Alfred A. Knopf). Her novel, The Tusk That Did the Damage (Alfred A. Knopf), was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and longlisted for the Financial Times Oppenheimer Fund Emerging Voices Award. Her latest novel, Loot, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in June 2023 and was longlisted for the National Book Award.
Honor Levy is a writer from California. She graduated from Bennington College in 2020. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and New York Tyrant and has been anthologized in Flash Fiction America. Her collection of short stories, My First Book, was published in 2024.
Randall Park is known for his work in Fresh Off the Boat, Always Be My Maybe, and Veep. He is in both the Marvel and DC universes in WandaVision, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Aquaman and its sequel, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Park's directorial debut, Shortcomings, was released in 2023.
Karah Preiss is a creative producer living in New York City. She co-founded Belletrist Book Club with actress Emma Roberts, along with Belletrist Productions, a TV and film production company. In 2022, Belletrist Productions produced the streaming series First Kill and Tell Me Lies. Preiss’s work has been featured in HuffPost and Publishers Weekly, among other publications.
Emma Roberts is an acclaimed actress, executive producer, and co-founder of Belletrist Book Club alongside Karah Preiss. Under their Belletrist TV production banner, Emma served as a co-executive producer on the critically acclaimed series Tell Me Lies. On the small screen, she is recognized for her starring roles in Scream Queens and multiple seasons of the anthology horror series American Horror Story, and her silver screen credits including We’re the Millers, Holidate, Madame Web, Space Cadet, and Saurus City.
Charlie Watts earned his MFA from Brown University in 1992, studying with Robert Coover, Meredith Steinbach, Michael Ondaatje, and Hortense Calisher. His writing has been featured in Carve, The Chicago Quarterly Review, Clerestory, CRAFT, Narrative, and Storm Cellar, among other publications. “Arrangements” won the 2015 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. Watts was also a finalist in the 2016 Hemingway Shorts contest sponsored by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park.
Alexander Weinstein is the author of the short story collections Universal Love and Children of the New World, named a notable book of the year by The New York Times, NPR, and Electric Literature. His story “Saying Goodbye to Yang” was adapted into the film After Yang, winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. His stories, essays, and interviews can be found at alexanderweinstein.com.
Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among other novels. A musical of The Interestings is in development. Wolitzer was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and also writes books for young readers. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a yearlong intensive for emerging novelists.
CREDITS
“Good Boys,” by Honor Levy, as published in The New Yorker (July 23, 2020). Copyright © 2020 by Honor Levy. Used by permission of TK
“Medusa,” by Tania James, from Oxford American (March 13, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Tania James. Used by permission of the author.
“We Only Wanted Their Happiness,” by Alexander Weinstein, from Universal Love (Henry Holt and Co., 2020). Copyright © 2020 by Alexander Weinstein. Used by permission of the author.
“Arrangements,” by Charlie Watts, as published in Carve Magazine (October 15, 2015). Copyright © 2015 by Charlie Watts. Used by permission of the author.
