One evening a few months ago, 15 women arrived after-hours at the Phillips auction house on the stretch of Midtown Manhattan just below Central Park known as Billionaires’ Row. They were there for, of all things, a book club, and they had snagged their $70 tickets in the minutes before they sold out. The host, British influencer Lizzy Hadfield, greeted each of the guests and pointed them toward servers standing ready with orange wine. Many of the attendees resembled Hadfield—30-ish, dressed elegantly in all black, and carrying Rebecca Makkai’s novel The Great Believers.
After 20 minutes of mingling in the Phillips gallery, the group sat down at a big table filled with extravagant charcuterie boards, surrounded by artwork by Roy Lichtenstein and Ed Ruscha. Hadfield began the discussion before handing it over to the guests.
Hadfield’s book club, Buffy’s, turns a year old this spring. The club has monthly gatherings that, like its organizer, switch between either side of the Atlantic. It also hosts virtual discussions on Substack, where more than 6,000 subscribers follow along. On her personal accounts, Hadfield has 800,000 followers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, where she started making content more than a decade ago.
Buffy’s is just one in a recent wave of book clubs catering not to the celebrity- and celebrity-author-centric reader experiences favored by the mainstream—those of Oprah and Reese Witherspoon and Jenna Bush Hager, Elin Hilderbrand and Colleen Hoover—but to more niche communities of people in their 20s and 30s who have decided it’s cool to read.
What may have started with a celebrity push—in 2022, The New York Times went searching for the “notorious celebrity book stylist” supplying the likes of Kendall Jenner with volumes to accessorize their Instagram posts—has in large part moved beyond the celebrity sphere. As the writer Emily Sundberg put it in a recent newsletter on the subject for her Substack, Feed Me, “The girls are making it clear that they’re reading.” And this new spate of book clubs and salons is here for it.
Reading Rhythms, founded by four young readers who hosted the first event on their own rooftop, now organizes regular “reading parties” at venues across New York City. In Los Angeles, the hotelier André Balazs and Angela Janklow, daughter of the famed literary agent Morton Janklow, have started Chat Chats, a monthly series of “Sunday afternoon literary salons” at the Chateau Marmont.
And the book clubs that do have a celebrity attached—Kaia Gerber’s Library Science, Dua Lipa’s Service95, Emma Roberts’s Belletrist, Dakota Johnson’s TeaTime—seemingly go to great lengths to separate themselves from any sense of commerciality, opting for more literary selections, such as Dear Dickhead, by Virginie Despentes, and The Mystery Guest, by Grégoire Bouillier, and events. (Dua Lipa delivered a keynote speech at the 2022 Booker Prize ceremony.)
The stated goal of Library Science is to “curate books that aren’t on the typical bestseller lists.” Buffy’s member Cecilia Giraldi, a Milan-based student who has a Substack about reading, likes that the Buffy’s selections are made “by someone who has taste and who knows books.... It’s not your silly little romance or a book that went viral on TikTok,” she says.
It helps that the brains behind many of these new book clubs also happens to be a young, stylish, non-celebrity reader with a keen sense of what young, stylish, non-celebrity readers want. Alyssa Reeder, who previously worked at places such as Vanity Fair, thought up Library Science with Gerber; Karah Preiss, daughter of the book publicist Sandi Mendelson, runs Belletrist with Roberts.
These clubs appear curated and exclusive. Even if anyone can join, a person has to know they exist. Their Web sites and social-media presence appear not overly designed but instead like what a stylish and very online friend would post. They put out limited-edition micro-totes, in the case of Library Science—a subtle antidote to the endemic New Yorker and Didion bags seen on every other person in New York and Los Angeles.
“Where Reese is maybe tied with a bow and polka dots, now you have … Kaia Gerber,” says Tara Larsen, who with Emma Benshoff, Ashleigh Magee, and Riley Vaske in September started the book club Lit Girl, which has a Substack for literary discussions based on themed syllabi.
The fact that these smaller communities don’t move books the way the big clubs do—publishers rely heavily on Oprah’s Book Club, Reese’s Book Club, and Read with Jenna to sell copies, though the writer Emily Gould asked if even that is now changing, in a story published Thursday in New York magazine—only seems to underline their intent to move away from commerciality and into the niche.
The one exception to all this is Sally Rooney, whose living contradiction—literary but with vast commercial success—is reflected in book clubs’ picks: Belletrist hosted an event for the Irish novelist’s latest book, Intermezzo, last fall, while Hadfield avoided it, saying, “Rooney doesn’t need any help selling more copies.… And enough people are going to reach for that book anyway and read it.” Library Science also opted not to cover Intermezzo (but its first book-club pick was Rooney’s Normal People).
This book-culture shift goes beyond clubs. Last fall, New York magazine’s the Cut launched a newsletter called Book Gossip. Earlier this month, Cultured magazine announced a new books editor-at-large position. And Sarah McNally, the savvy Canadian whose independent bookstores have taken over New York City, is said to be influencing her pal James Daunt’s designs at scale. As Lisa Lucas, the former National Book Foundation executive director and Pantheon and Schocken Books senior vice president, said in a recent New York–magazine profile of McNally, the Daunt-operated Barnes & Nobles “now look exactly like” McNally Jackson bookstores—“shockingly like.” (According to New York, McNally aims to one day “build a network of book clubs and … ‘reading festivals.’”)
Fashion brands are also wanting in on the reading mania—Miu Miu hosted a two-day “literary club” in Milan and distributed free books in eight cities, while a recent Saint Laurent campaign was based on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—and tapping smaller, edgier new book clubs for collaboration. Belletrist partnered with Valentino to support indie bookstores. DKNY’s spring campaign featured Gerber with books. And Buffy’s hosted a literary salon event with J. Crew in New York. These days, one of the ways to sell clothes is, seemingly, to put them on a person who reads.
All the while, new book clubs seem to be cropping up faster than one could finish reading a novel—which Hadfield thinks is a good thing. “There is enough space for there to be a million book clubs if there need to be,” she says, “because of how many books there are.”
Max Kutner is a New York–based writer
