Texas organizations launch virtual book club during pandemic

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Writer David Samuel Levinson is a big fan of big reads, during which communities come together to read and discuss a single book.

So when he was brainstorming about possible collaborations during the COVID-19 crisis between Gemini Ink and Writing Workshops Dallas, literary organizations the San Antonio native works closely with, he suggested a statewide big read with virtual discussions. They immediately started figuring out how to make it happen.

“We realize, at this time, people need literary communities,” Alexandra van de Kamp, executive director of Gemini Ink, told the San Antonio Express-News. “We came up with the idea of the Big Texas Read.”

They wanted to select a book by a Texas writer. It wasn’t Levinson’s intent to kick off the series with one of his own novels: “ I pitched them some other books, but they said, ‘Let’s use yours. It’s kind of perfect,’” he said from Little Rock, Arkansas, where he is writer-in-residence at the state university there. “It’s not about a virus, but it is about a dystopia.”

The book is his 2017 satiric novel “Tell Me How This Ends Well.” The Big Texas Read officially kicks off April 15. Readers can sign up to participate for free at geminiink.org or writingworkshops.com.

“Tell Me How This Ends Well” is set in the United States in 2022.

“There is kind of a despot as president, and things are quite terrible in the United States because Israel has been disbanded and there’s an influx of Israelis who move into the country, and it creates a problem, just as migrants from any country moving into a predominantly homogeneous culture such as America would have issues with,” the Churchill High School grad said. “America undergoes a rise in anti-Semitism the likes of which...