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Club Calvi is calling all readers to vote on its next book!
You choices are these Top 3 FicPicks:
"This is the Only Kingdom" by Jaquira Díaz is about a mother and daughter fighting for their family after a murder threatens to tear everything apart.
In the autobiographical novel, "Bad Bad Girl," author Gish Jen imagines her mother's early life in China and explores their complicated relationship in New York.
"Workhorse" by Caroline Palmer is the story of an ambitious woman trying to succeed at a top fashion magazine in New York City but she doesn't come from the right social circles.
You can read excerpts, vote, and get the books below.
Voting closes Sunday, November 2 at 6pm.
The CBS New York Book Club focuses on books connected to the Tri-State Area in their plots and/or authors. The books may contain adult themes.
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"This is the Only Kingdom" by Jaquira Díaz
From the publisher: When Maricarmen meets Rey el Cantante, beloved small-time Robin Hood and local musician on the rise, she begins to envision a life beyond the tight-knit community of el Caserío, Puerto Rico – beyond cleaning houses, beyond waiting tables, beyond the constant tug of war between the street hustlers and los camarones. But breaking free proves more difficult than she imagined, and she soon finds herself struggling to make a home for herself, for Rey, his young brother Tito, and eventually, their daughter Nena. Until one fateful day changes everything.
Fifteen years later, Maricarmen and Nena find themselves in the middle of a murder investigation as the community that once rallied to support Rey turns against them. Now Nena, a teenager haunted by loss and betrayal and exploring her sexual identity, must learn to fight for herself and her family in a world not always welcoming.
Jaquira Díaz lives in New York.
"This is the Only Kingdom" by Jaquira Díaz (ThriftBooks) $22
"Bad Bad Girl" by Gish Jen
From the publisher: My mother had died, but still I heard her voice. . .
Gish's mother, Loo Shu-hsin, is born in 1924 to a wealthy Shanghai family whose girls are expected to restrain themselves. Her beloved nursemaid—far more loving to than her real mother—is torn from her even as she is constantly reprimanded: "Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!" Sent to a modern Catholic school by her progressive father, she receives not only an English name—Agnes—but a first-rate education. To his delight, she excels. But even then he can only sigh, "Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot." Agnes finds solace in books and, in 1947, announces her intention to pursue a PhD in America. As the Communist revolution looms, she sets sail—never to return.
Lonely and adrift in New York, she begins dating Jen Chao-Pe, an engineering student. They do their best to block out the increasingly dire plight of their families back home and successfully establish a new American life: Marriage! A house in the suburbs! A number one son! By the time Gish is born, though, the news from China is proving inescapable; their marriage is foundering; and Agnes, confronted with a strong-willed, outspoken daughter distinctly reminiscent of herself, is repeating the refrain—"Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!"—as she recapitulates the harshness of her own childhood.
Gish Jen lives in Massachusetts.
"Bad Bad Girl" by Gish Jen (ThriftBooks) $23
"Workhorse" by Caroline Palmer
From the publisher: At the turn of the millennium, Editorial Assistant Clodagh "Clo" Harmon wants nothing more than to rise through the ranks at the world's most prestigious fashion magazine. There's just one problem: she doesn't have the right pedigree. Instead, Clo is a "workhorse" surrounded by beautiful, wealthy, impossibly well-connected "show horses" who get ahead without effort, including her beguiling cubicle-mate, Davis Lawrence, the daughter of a beloved but fading Broadway actress. Harry Wood, Davis's boarding school classmate and a reporter with visions of his own media empire, might be Clo's ally in gaming the system—or he might be the only thing standing between Clo and her rightful place at the top.
In a career punctuated by moments of high absurdity, sudden windfalls, and devastating reversals of fortune, Clo wades across boundaries, taking ever greater and more dangerous risks to become the important person she wants to be within the confines of a world where female ambition remains cloaked. But who really is Clo underneath all the borrowed designer clothes and studied manners—and who are we if we share her desires?
Caroline Palmer lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
"Workhorse" by Caroline Palmer (ThriftBooks) $24
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Excerpt: ""This is the Only Kingdom" by Jaquira Díaz
"El Cantante"
The end of summer in el Caserío Padre Rivera meant the end of freedom. It meant back to Padre Rivera Elementary for the little kids, and the teenagers hoofing it to el pueblo in their scuffed loafers and starch-ironed hand-me-down uniforms. No more sleeping 'til noon for Cano, in his last year at UPR Humacao, and a return to early days at the parish for his older brother, David, a deacon soon to be an ordained priest. It meant long, quiet mornings in the neighborhood again: satos roaming the streets in packs, women sweeping their balconies in silence while the café brewed in la greca, men playing dominoes in la plaza, hustlers throwing dice under the shade of the flamboyán.
Every day after school, sixteen-year-old Maricarmen and her younger sister, Loli, walked past the basketball courts on their way home. Loli was only fourteen, but she was supposed to have dinner ready when their mother came home from work. While Loli finished her homework, a pot of arroz con salchichas simmering on the stove, Maricarmen went off to one of her after-school jobs. Some days, Maricarmen took care of the neighbor's eight-year-old twins. Some days, she cleaned apartments. She'd speed past the basketball courts as she headed to work, the ballers pausing their game just to get a good look, calling out to her, "Mira, nena, where you going in such a hurry?"
One afternoon, Maricarmen was on her way to clean Doña Matos's apartment when she walked past the guys dribbling on the blacktop. She heard one of them wolf-whistle. She was still wearing her high school uniform, maroon skirt and white button-down shirt. She cut her eyes at him, kept walking.
"Leave that girl alone," she heard Cano say. He was Doña Matos's youngest son. He was in college, and barely spoke to Maricarmen when she was over at their house.
"I was just trying to talk to her," the other guy said. "Hey, girl! Come here!"
"She's in high school," Cano said. "What's wrong with you?"
"She's in your house like every day. You mean to tell me you never even tried?"
Maricarmen climbed the steps to Doña Matos's apartment, paying them no mind.
"Bye, Mari!" one of the guys called out.
She ignored him. It was always like this with them. A lot of jokes, flirting. She never took them seriously.
Doña Matos had already left for her shift at the hospital when Maricarmen let herself in. David was polishing off a bowl of sancocho at the small kitchen table, dipping bits of pan sobao in the broth and popping them into his mouth.
"Buenas tardes, Padre," Maricarmen said, smiling as she shut the door behind her.
"I'm not ordained yet," David said. He pointed at the bread on the table. "Sit. Eat, if you're hungry."
"I'm all right," she said. She opened the storage closet and pulled out the cleaning supplies: a spray bottle, a pair of plastic gloves, and a cleaning towel. Maricarmen came every couple of weeks, two or three days in a row, depending on how long it took to finish the entire three-bedroom apartment. Usually, if she worked quickly, she could finish a room in half an hour, maybe two rooms in forty-five minutes. But when David was around, she took longer, talking as she cleaned, listening to his stories about mission trips to Cuba and Nicaragua, about priests telling jokes over red wine in Portugal.
Maricarmen waited for David to finish his sancocho before clearing the table. "So when's the big day?" she asked. She sprayed and wiped the table.
"A few months." David, who wore thick prescription glasses and a dress shirt, looked up at Maricarmen, nodding thoughtfully. "Just a few months now."
Maricarmen smiled. He was gentle, David the deacon. Soft-spoken, sometimes a little nervous, but laughter always came easy to him. Sometimes, when he wasn't telling her stories that made her throw her head back and roar, he was like this, pensive. What did they do all day, those priests? she wondered. Pray? Think?
"Do you think it's hard?" she asked.
David slid back in his chair. "What do you mean?"
"You know. Like, never getting married. Never having children." She considered how to say the rest, holding the towel and the spray bottle tightly. "Never being with a woman?"
David studied her. "Aren't you a little too young to be worrying about those things?"
She thought about it. By the time her mother was sixteen, she was already married and pregnant with her. "No."
David laughed. "Don't try to grow up too soon, Mari."
Maricarmen felt her face grow hot. David was twenty-five, nine years older than her, but he'd never made her feel like a kid before. She knew he hadn't meant any harm. He was just looking out for her.
"Okay, old man," she said. She smiled once more, sprayed the counter.
They were both unusually quiet after that, Maricarmen cleaning methodically and David retreating to the living room to watch TV.
On her way out, she stashed away the cleaning supplies and avoided saying goodbye to David. He'd fallen asleep on the couch, and she didn't want to wake him.
Outside, instead of rushing past the basketball courts, she stood on the sidewalk, watching. The guys were still playing, but no one noticed her. She looked for Cano on the court, ran her fingers through her hair.
She watched them chase each other from one end of the court to the other, dribbling the basketball, taking shots. She unbuttoned the bottom of her shirt, then tied a knot high up on her waist, showing off her navel. She considered crossing the street to sit at one of the benches, but she didn't think she was brave enough. She ran her fingers through her hair again.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?"
Maricarmen jumped at her mother's voice. She tugged on the knot on her shirt, tried to hide her belly with her hands, but her mother was no fool.
Blanca, red-faced and sweaty, carried her three-inch heels in one hand, her purse strapped across her body. She was barefoot on the sidewalk, breathing hard, her dark bob messy and stringy with sweat.
"What happened to your shoes, Mami?" Maricarmen asked, trying to distract her.
Blanca looked her up and down, ignoring the question. "You done parading yourself in front of the whole block?" She pulled Maricarmen's shirt down, then pointed toward the basketball courts. "You think that these bandoleros are going to respect you?"
"I'm just heading home," Maricarmen said. She turned for their building, but her mother grabbed her by the elbow.
"Don't let me catch you with any of them, you hear me?" Blanca said, squeezing.
Maricarmen pulled away, forcing Blanca to loosen her grip. She was sick of her mother always grabbing her, humiliating her in front of her friends, their neighbors, yelling at her in front of whoever happened to be passing by. And she was sick of her mother always talking bad about "those people" in front of anyone who could hear her. Maricarmen's family was one of the few white families in el Caserío, and Blanca thought that made them better. The truth was, Maricarmen and Loli were ashamed of the way their mother talked down to anyone who was even a shade darker than her. Maricarmen couldn't wait to leave home.
Maricarmen gave her mother a look, one look, and hoped that Blanca understood exactly how she felt. She turned toward their apartment building, leaving her mother on the sidewalk alone.
This excerpt is from Jaquira Diaz's book, "This is the Only Kingdom," published on October 21st by Algonquin Books, a division of Hachette Book Group.
Excerpt: "Bad Bad Girl" by Gish Jen
My mother had died, but still I heard her voice.
Your grandmother was a Suzhou beauty, she says. Do you know where is Suzhou?Of course, I say. West of Shanghai.
For I do know: Suzhou is where the classic Chinese gardens are—the Humble Administrator's Garden. The Lingering Garden. The Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets. West of Shanghai is the correct answer. But my mother does not say so. She is the same now as she was when she was alive—a master of the art of withholding.
Your grandmother was a Suzhou beauty, my mother says again. She spoke Suzhou dialect, Chinese people say it is like singing. And she was tall and thin. By the standards of 1920s Shanghai, of course.
Meaning thin but maybe not so tall, I think. As was my mother in her youth, too, although I mostly picture her in her late-life, big-bellied stage, when she had the bulbous shape of a snake that has swallowed a large animal. Her stomach was so perfectly spherical that had she not been in her nineties, you might have thought her pregnant, and indeed it was likely the result of her five children, the second of whom was me.
But, whatever.
Go on, I say.
All my life, after all, I have wanted to know how our relationship went wrong—how I became her nemesis, her bête noire, her lightning rod, a scapegoat.
You look like her, she says. Only not so tall, not so thin, not so beautiful.
Oh, I laugh. Now, this is the mother I remember, tactful as a sledgehammer. You are too kind.
When I see you, I see her, she says.
Oh, no. Your mother? I say. Because of all the possible misfortunes of birth, to remind your mother of a mother who had rejected her is surely one of the worst—as well as, it seems, a great unmentionable. For what does she immediately say but: Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!
My grandmother was twenty-two and my grandfather forty-eight when they married, and for all I know, he was a ringer for James Bond. But in the only picture I have of him, he is short and rotund. He is wearing a padded Chinese gown; his arms splay in a way that might put one in mind of a penguin. And then there are his porthole glasses, thick and black as Mr. Magoo's. Actually, he was a crack Chinese banker up to whose porte-cochere chauffeured cars would roll, their shiny doors opening to reveal the gigantic shoes of foreigners. At one point, he saved China's rural banks from collapse by convincing the Shanghai to back them—or so the family story goes, at least—holding the meeting at his house because his was the only driveway big enough to handle so many cars. My aunt remembers coming downstairs and asking what was going on. To which my grandmother answered, Baba has just saved banking in China. But in the photograph, he mostly looks earthquake-proof—as if, were there to be a big one, he would be the last to topple.
His first wife having died—"of natural causes," my mother always said, as if we might suspect foul play—my grandfather needed to replace her. He had had two children by that first wife, after all. Someone had to take charge of them. And so: enter a matchmaker with a photo of my grandmother the Suzhou beauty.
My father would boom, "Hello, hello!" to the foreigners as they filled up the garden, my mother says now. It was the only English he knew. And so it was always "Hello, hello!"
What about your mother? What did she say? I ask.
My mother was always sort of like in the background, she says. You do not see her too much; she does not have too much to say.
People said she never even laughed out loud. Is that true? She was a real lady. Very proper.
She had self-control, you mean.
That's right! Not like you, always talking, she says. Too much to say.
Proper though she might have been, my grandmother did smoke opium. She was not an addict. She was a social smoker, as most society women were—a smoker of expensive Persian opium, beautifully prepared for her and her friends by an opium sous-chef. Never mind the price, opium was so good for cramps, they agreed, and oh! How bright the opium-smoker's world, how bright and sharp and glorious! It was all the world should be, a world in which a woman might make demands—demands! can you imagine?—and even laugh out loud, keeping a hand over her mouth as a giggle bubbled up through her fingers.Another world, indeed.
My grandmother could not read, but she was hardly alone. Never mind most women, most people in China couldn't read, not even in modern Shanghai. What with its neon lights and dance clubs and exciting crossroads style—its hǎipài, as people called it—Shanghai was known as "the Paris of the East." But alongside its cars and trams and double-decker buses rolled ox-drawn carts and rickshaws and wheelbarrows. The British racecourse boasted the largest grandstand in the world; its clubhouse featured so much teak and marble, it could have been a land-bound Titanic. But cheek by jowl with its splendors sprawled the sort of shanty- towns for which words like "destitute" and "squalid" were coined. Many of the shanties did not even boast bamboo-pole walls; many were straw-mat lean-tos. This "Paris" was no Paris.
Excerpted from Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen. Published October 2025 by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Gish Jen.
Excerpt: "Workhorse" by Caroline Palmer
I do not yet exist.
I am not on the masthead and, as such, I do not exist.
When your name is not on the masthead—which is the list, in order of importance, of who works at a magazine printed on the inside of a magazine—the workday begins earlier than it does for the other girls. There is no one to tell you this, of course, no official orientation, but the right kind of girl can sense it, like you can sense the weight in a yellowing sky.
I am the right kind of girl.
On this particular morning, like every morning, I stop to swap my shoes before I enter the office. I perform this humiliating task in a dank little inset I discovered during my walk from the subway on my second day of work, and today, like every day, I sneak a furtive glance down the street to make sure nobody is watching me. Then, I slink backward into the timid autumn shadows.
Next, I lift a pair of black high heels out of my large leather handbag and place them neatly on the sidewalk. I rest one hand on the cool concrete wall to steady myself before I wriggle a foot out of a black flat before (and with an almost astounding lack of physical elegance) I attempt to insert myself into the resistant leather of one of the high heels. Some days, this operation goes off without a hitch. Other days, the heel tips over and I must use my big toe—cursing, desperate, my armpits warming—to set it right again. This morning: I lose my balance, and my foot hits the ground with a gummy thud. I grimace, yanking it back up in the air.
"F***," I whisper.
I steal a quick look over my shoulder, only to confirm nobody has caught me out in this most pathetic act, and I try again. This time, I am successful: My damp flesh squeaks into the body of the shoe. Next, with my balance precarious, I lift my other leg into the air before I slide into the other shoe. I quickly bend over and, with two fingers, I hook the back of the flats lying on the ground and toss them inside my handbag. This, of course, is disgusting, but it wasn't until I arrived in New York over the summer that I discovered the actual "use case" for the soft cloth bags that came with a new pair of fancy shoes, which is, apparently, to keep the revolting things one walks through on the streets of New York from sloughing off onto all the items in your handbag.
The heels on these shoes are too high—I bought them off a friend of a friend who had purchased them at a Manolo Blahnik sample sale, only to decide they were too pointy—but I don't care: They make me feel almost obscenely able. You look very competent, the girl sagely said, handing her new shoes over for the bargain price of $100. Truth be told, they are basically impossible to walk in, but when I stand utterly motionless, I am nearly six feet tall and a force to behold. When they came into my possession, my very first pair of designer shoes, I bought one of those sponge kits from Duane Reade, and I buff the leather before bed every night to keep them looking new. Occasionally the heels get nicked on one of those metal grates that pock the never-ending flesh of the city, but I am diligent about taking them to the shoe repair storefront in my neighborhood because, in this fresh new world, I am learning it is diligence, not cleanliness, that is next to Godliness. Armed with this new knowledge, I now spend half my days placing girls into categories. On the train to work, I search for any small sign or signal of other people's failings. The girls with nicked heels or chipped manicures are lazy. The girls who cross their legs at the knee on the subway are trashy. The girls with big silver hoop earrings or skirts with handkerchief hemlines are tacky. The girls with Kors by Michael Kors bags are cheap.
Today, when I clip unevenly past a still-shuttered corner restaurant en route to my office, there is a paunchy, unshaven man aggressively washing down the mottled sidewalk, water blasting out of a thick black hose. He releases his grip on the handle at the last possible second to let me pass without getting wet. I don't look at him, and he doesn't look at me, but like dancers, we dance. It's strange: I am always unnerved by the odd, oppressive silence of midtown Manhattan in the early hours. Every footstep sounds like it has been amplified, but the actual people passing by me seem strangely insulated from the world, like they are incubating inside their own bubble, readying to be reborn. I look at them with a suspicion veiled as harried indifference, and they do the same to me. I push through the revolving doors of my office building.
The lobby feels sacred, somehow, glacial and hushed at this hour, as everyone shakes off the missteps of yesterday, shedding their crumpled old skins at the door. I pull a week-old
copy of The New York Observer from my bag and hold it performatively to my chest as I stride across the marble floor. I ride the elevator alone. The head receptionist for our magazine has yet to arrive, so I pull out my badge and let myself through the oversized glass doors. I am arriving to work at a magazine in New York City, I narrate. I am young enough that I still live in the movie of my mind without knowing that we always live in the movie of our minds. I don't yet know that we will never arrive anywhere. I don't know we will always think someone is watching.
I learn all this much later.
Excerpted from WORKHORSE by Caroline Palmer. Copyright © 2025 by Caroline Palmer. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.
