A Citywide Book Club

If you’ve wanted to join a book club, but haven’t gotten around to it, here’s your chance. And it’s not just any book club. This one involves the entire city of Boston and it’s called One City, One Story.

The citywide initiative is the brainchild of the Boston Book Festival, which is celebrating its second annual festival next week. The idea behind the program is to promote community around a shared short story.

“The huge success of our inaugural festival last year proved that Boston has a passion for reading,” says Emily D’Amour Pardo, executive director of the festival. “We want to explore this further by uniting the city around a single story and examining it from the many different perspectives that exist here.”

Boston Book Festival organizers wanted to pick a short story written by a local author that could be distributed to tens of thousands of Boston readers. A committee selected Belmont author Tom Perrotta’s “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face.” Perrotta is known best for his novels Election, Little Children, and The Abstinence Teacher, but also writes short stories. “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face” was originally published in Post Road Magazine and later in Best American Short Stories 2005.    

Deborah Z. Porter, founding president of the Boston Book Festival, says Perrotta’s story was selected both for its literary merit and its accessibility. “Tom has crafted a story that is at once funny and poignant, exploring the universal themes of family, parenthood, adolescence, and intolerance in a fresh and absorbing way.”

Thanks to support from the Goldhirsh Foundation, 30,000 bound copies of the story were distributed earlier this month at Boston libraries, subway stops, and coffee shops. Among the volunteers handing out copies was Mark Krone, manager of graduate admissions at the College of Fine Arts. “I spent a few hours passing out stories at the South End Open Markets and it was great,” he says. “People were excited, and the ones who took a story seemed grateful the festival was doing this.”

With copies of “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face” now in the hands of thousands of readers throughout the city, organizers want to hear from them. On Tuesday, October 12, at 7 p.m., there will be a discussion of the story at the Faneuil branch of the Boston Public Library, 419 Faneuil St., Brighton. Organizers say the event will play a crucial part in promoting the program’s message that reading can bring people together. “It is a great way to build community,” says Krone. “We know we live in a city full of readers, but we don’t talk to each other about what we’re reading.”

If you want to be part of the citywide initiative, but weren’t lucky enough to snag a copy of “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face,” don’t worry. You can download Perrotta’s story here.

Festival organizers hope that Bostonians will read and discuss the work in time to take part in a town hall–style discussion led by Perrotta, scheduled to take place at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 16, at Church of the Covenant, 67 Newbury St. The discussion is one of many events marking the second annual Boston Book Festival.

All things Boston Book Festival, including the schedule and complete lineup of authors, can be found here.

Tom Vellner can be reached at tvellner@bu.edu; follow him on Twitter at @tomgvellner.