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Which FicPick will get your vote for the next Club Calvi read?
You can help decide the next book for Club Calvi! Three new novels are our Top 3 FicPicks, but only one can be the Readers' Choice.
Which book would you like to read?
In "Sleep" by Honor Jones, a recently divorced mother returns to her childhood home in New Jersey with her daughters. She's forced to confront her childhood trauma and the family secrets she has avoided for much of her life.
"Aftertaste" by Daria Lavelle is about a man who can taste the favorite food of ghosts, and reunite them with their loved ones during a meal. His unique palate takes him to New York City's restaurant scene where linking life with afterlife comes with dangerous consequences.
In "The Doorman" by Chris Pavone, a doorman stands guard for the famous and wealthy residents of a luxury Upper West Side building where inside drama plays out while outside conflict rages during a day that brings New York City to the brink and may end in murder.
Voting closes Sunday, June 1 at 6 p.m.
You can read excerpts and get the books below.
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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"Sleep" by Honor Jones
From the publisher: Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously – the one she was born into, and the one she has made.
Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family's verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood, slip away.
Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents' bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She's newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone.
Honor Jones Lives in Brooklyn.
"Sleep" by Honor Jones (ThriftBooks) $21
"Aftertaste" by Daria Lavelle
From the publisher: Konstantin Duhovny is a haunted man. His father died when he was ten, and ghosts have been hovering around him ever since. Kostya can't exactly see the ghosts, but he can taste their favorite foods. Flavors of meals he's never eaten will flood his mouth, a sign that a spirit is present. Kostya has kept these aftertastes a secret for most of his life, but one night, he decides to act on what he's tasting. And everything changes.
Kostya discovers that he can reunite people with their deceased loved ones—at least for the length of time it takes them to eat a dish that he's prepared. He thinks his life's purpose might be to offer closure to grieving strangers, and sets out to learn all he can by entering a particularly fiery ring of Hell: the New York culinary scene. But as his kitchen skills catch up with his ambitions, Kostya is too blind to see the catastrophe looming in the Afterlife. And the one person who knows Kostya must be stopped also happens to be falling in love with him.
Daria Lavelle lives in New Jersey.
"Aftertaste" By Daria Lavelle (ThriftBooks) $23
"The Doorman" by Chris Pavone
From the publisher: Chicky Diaz is everyone's favorite doorman at the Bohemia, the most famous apartment house in the world, home of celebrities, financiers, and New York's cultural elite.
Up in the penthouse, Emily Longworth has the perfect-looking everything, all except her husband, whom she'd quietly loathed even before the recent revelations about where all the money comes from. But his wealth is immense, their prenup is iron-clad, and Emily can't bring herself to leave him. Yet.
And downstairs in 2a, Julian Sonnenberg—who has carved himself a successful niche in the art world, and led a good half-century of a full and satisfying, cosmopolitan life—has just received a devastating phone call that does nothing at all to alleviate his sense that, probably for better and worse, he has aged out and he's just not that useful to anyone any more.
Meanwhile, gathered in the Bohemia's bowels, the building's almost entirely Black and Hispanic, working-class staff is taking in the news that that just a few miles uptown, a Black man has been killed by the police, leading to a demonstration, a counterdemonstration, and a long night of violence across the tinderbox city.
As Chicky changes into his uniform for tonight's shift, he finds himself breaking a cardinal rule of the job: tonight, he'll be carrying a gun, bought only hours earlier, but before he knew of the pandemonium taking over the city. Chicky knows that there's more going on in his patch of sidewalk in front of the Bohemia than anyone's aware of. Tonight in the city, enemies will clash, loyalties will be tested, secrets will be revealed—and lives will be lost.
Chris Pavone lives in New York City.
"The Doorman" by Chris Pavone (ThriftBooks) $23
Excerpt: "Sleep" by Honor Jones
Thursdays were usually Ezra's night, but today was his girlfriend's birthday, so he'd asked Margaret to swap. She was glad to do him a favor, gladder still of the bonus night. She wanted as much time with the girls as possible before they all went to New Jersey for the weekend. She wanted to stamp in their minds that they were her children, that they lived in Brooklyn, that they didn't belong to Elizabeth's house with the marble counters and the swimming pool.
At 5:00 she buzzed his building, and before she'd even climbed the first grim stair she could hear her children. "Mommy!"
"How was the afternoon?" she asked Ezra.
"Jo had that playdate but wouldn't play," he said.
Jo and Helen had each wrapped themselves around Margaret's legs, and she was lifting them like heavy shoes.
"Jo," Ezra said, "it's rude not to play."
"Guys, go get your stuff," Margaret said, as she tried to pry the girls off her legs. They just laughed. "Try to walk, Mommy," they said.
Ezra never got them ready to go before she arrived. She wasn't sure if it was because he didn't think to or didn't want to or if it was more intentional—if he liked prolonging this time with her. It was never pleasant; she was never so sweaty and shrill as when she was trying to get her children's shoes on. "Socks and shoes! Socks and shoes! Helen, how many times do I have to say it, put on your socks." Maybe it was somehow helpful to him, seeing her struggle so ineffectually like this.
"What's wrong?" he asked her. "Nothing," she said, meaning: this.
Ezra was a managing editor at The Really, which he described as a small, tech-focused digital magazine, though in fact it was published by a branch of the PR department of the world's most powerful social media company. In his seven-year tenure, the magazine had cycled through many names: Ikon, Aria, Interrobang. He seemed to spend most of his time in meetings brainstorming new names, or in meetings about best practices for future meetings for brainstorming new names, or in meetings to discuss the demographics of those future meetings and how to ensure that everyone participated equally in the important work of brainstorming new names. Occasionally he worked on an infographic about disinformation. He was paid as much as an entry-level coder, which was to say, far more than she was. She could ask him for child support but didn't want to, and he hadn't offered for the obvious reason that the divorce was her idea. He wore black hoodies and cared about all the right things and was widely admired professionally for being almost entirely egoless.
But Margaret had found it frustrating to be dominated by a husband who acted so insistently uninterested in power. When he faded into the background, he expected her to fade too, bundling up her wifely skirts and following him down the dim passageways of self-effacement.
Ridiculous to be resentful of that still. This was what came of lingering. What on earth were the girls doing? Helen was lying on the floor coloring. One sock was on one foot. Jo was in the bathroom. "Ezra, can you help with Helen, please?" she asked him, in the fed-up-wife voice she knew he hated.
"You don't have to use that voice," he said. "I'm already helping," he said, though he wasn't.
"JoJo, what are you doing? We need to go eat dinner."
"I want some scream."
"What?"
"Some scream." She was rooting around in the medicine cabinet. She knocked over a bottle of mouthwash. Band-Aids and hair ties rained down.
Margaret was trying but failing to pick things up faster than Jo knocked them down. A jar of antiaging moisturizer clanked into the sink, the overnight evidence of Ezra's girlfriend. Margaret was worried it had cracked, but it hadn't. She picked it up and thought about opening it. She wanted to know what it smelled like. But that would be weird and invasive. She opened it anyway. It smelled good—warm and citrusy, like cream and oranges. She badly wanted to touch it, but that would be weird and invasive and perhaps even, in the girlfriend's eyes, unsanitary. She touched it anyway—stuck just the tip of a finger into the whipped pearlescence.
She was happy that Ezra had a girlfriend. Delighted, actually. Though the thought of her—a teacher named Anaya who wrote out grocery lists for elaborate dinners with different-colored gel pens that he persisted in magneting to his refrigerator—did seed a terrible panic that in ten years he would be happily remarried while Margaret would be alone with a vibrator with cat hair sticking to it.
"What birthday is it?" she'd asked Ezra, about Anaya's celebration that night. The answer: her thirtieth.
Margaret rubbed the cream into the skin between her eyes, into the wrinkle that was forming there. Jo knocked over Ezra's electric razor, and his beard trimmings went everywhere. "Okay, enough, enough," she said. "Jo, stop touching everything." Guiltily, she put her finger back into the cream and smoothed the surface flat, as if covering up a bootprint in the snow. "I'm begging you, go get your socks."
"Some scream," Jo said. She was holding up a tube of toothpaste.
"She means sunscreen," Helen called from the other room.
Ah. "You don't need sunscreen, JoJo," Margaret said, taking the toothpaste from her hand. "The sun is already going down. Shoes and socks!" she said again, in a bright desperate voice.
Helen stood in her single sock, taping her picture up against the window. The sky outside was golden with late-day sun, but the light stopped abruptly at the glass. Inside was already beginning the blue evening, shadows padding the corners of the room. On the couch was Ezra, watching her, looking more cheerful than she'd seen him in weeks.
"Mommy, come see," Helen said. "I drew a picture of Grandma's house."
From Sleep by Honor Jones. Copyright © 2025 by Honor Jones. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Excerpt: "Aftertaste" by Daria Lavelle
BITTER
The first time Konstantin Duhovny tasted something he hadn't actually eaten he was eleven, seated on the edge of the public pool in Brighton Beach, his heels churning grey water into foam.
He was watching the backs of the other boys—the ones he was supposed to be swimming with, but who never invited him, even out of politeness, into their circle—as they splashed about, showing off handstands and lung capacities, spouting chlorinated water a foot into the air like porpoises.
He watched them all afternoon—Mitya and Sasha and Misha K. and Misha B. (whom they kept calling Bear because of the thick, black hair up and down his back)—until, one by one, their fathers finished their waterlogged Russkaya Reklamas, scratched their nipples through threadbare white undershirts, and peeled their pasty bodies from the rubber loungers, signaling quitting time.
Kostya had come chaperoned by his cousin Valerik—not his real cousin, but the teenage son of Tetya Natasha, not his real aunt but an acquaintance of his mother's—who had promptly dumped him when his girlfriend whispered something about a kissing booth at the boardwalk nearby.
Don't you move, Valerik had hissed at Kostya. I'll be back.
That had been two hours ago.
As the last boy, Mitya, raised the handle of the chain-link fence, Kostya felt himself blister with jealousy. There was no one to ferry him home, just like there had been no one to slather sunblock onto his back—which he could already feel was red and tight and burnt—and just like there would be no one to teach him how to talk to these boys in a way that made it clear that he was one of them.
But then, of course, he wasn't one of them. Their fathers were alive.
He kicked faster at the water, kicked violently, kicked at the fathers and sons, kicked at the great cavity of longing inside himself, this way of missing someone, missing them desperately, missing every part including those he'd never known, a pocket so deep he thought that if he could only reach inside of it, worry its lining long enough, break through it to the other side, to where empty could grow full as a belly round with food, he might just find what he was looking for.
Right then, something traveled across his tongue, and Kostya stopped kicking. It coated the inside of his mouth, thick as paste, the taste—the uneaten taste—overpowering. It was savory, salty, the texture mealy, slightly sweet and fatty, something tart, barely, and then, at the tail, in the back of his throat, bitter, bitter, blooming like a bruise. Good, but also bad, just a little bit like s***. He wondered briefly whether one of the boys had found a way to make him ingest a turd—it seemed the sort of thing that boys with fathers could do to a boy without one—but just as quickly, the sensation vanished. Kostya smacked his lips, trying to call it back, but there was nothing left now, only a warmth spreading slowly across his tongue as he choked back tears.
It was only in the absence of the taste that he suddenly recognized what it had been.
Chicken liver, sautéed onions, fresh dill garnish, squeeze of lemon.
Pechonka.
His father's favorite dish, according to his mother, who invoked it infrequently and had stopped making it after he died. Kostya had never tasted pechonka. He just knew, like an instinct, like another sense he'd only now become conscious of, that the ghost of that dish—not its taste, but its aftertaste—had just been inside of his mouth, spirited there by the person who most longed to taste it again.
From AFTERTASTE. Copyright © 2025 by Daria Lavelle. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
Excerpt: "The Doorman" by Chris Pavone
FRONT DOOR
Chicky Diaz stands on his little patch of the earth, the clean quiet sidewalk in front of the Bohemia Apartments, thinking: there sure are a lot of great places to kill someone in this city.
There are the sprawling industrial zones in Hunts Point and Maspeth. There are the underpasses of bridges and highways and on-ramps and off-, all those loud echoing voids littered with abandoned vans and homeless camps and piles of trash. There are the late-night-creepy canyons down in the Financial District, and the creepier step streets up in Washington Heights, the ends of elevated subway stations, underground ones too. There are hundreds of miles of waterfront with car-sized boulders and crumbling piers that jut out into the deadly currents of rivers and canals and bays and the mighty Atlantic Ocean. There's that weird-a** auto- repair shantytown out in Willets Point, a place that reminds Chicky of nothing in the States so much as that time he and his buddies took a wrong turn in Panama City. A few wrong turns.
There's all of Staten Island, probably, though in truth Chicky has never stepped foot. Just driven through that time with Julio to visit Reggie who was living rough in Rahway. But he's heard.
There are the parks, ten thousand acres of hills and woods and beaches and ponds, grass ballfields and concrete courts and golf courses and even a lawn-bowling green of all things, just a few minutes from here. The bowlers wear all white. They basically are all white.
Signs at entrances claim park closes at dark but there aren't many gates that close and no attempt at enforcement. Has anyone ever been deterred by a Parks and Rec placard? It's like no spitting, no loitering, no jaywalking. The type of laws that make a mockery of the very idea of laws.
No jaywalking. What an idea.
The best place to kill someone, though? That's right at home. Away from witnesses and good Samaritans and security cameras, in environments that can be controlled and crime scenes that can be scrubbed, evidence that can be destroyed on the one hand or manufactured on the other. Behind the locked doors and closed curtains of aluminum-sided Capes in Elmhurst or Flatlands, of brownstones up in Harlem and out in Park Slope, of luxury lofts in Tribeca and s***** lofts in Bushwick, of little Tudors out in Forest Hills and huge Tudors up in Riverdale, of slums in the South Bronx and Brownsville, of the housing projects that are everywhere, in every corner of every borough, even places you'd never expect-the Alfred E. Smith Houses just a couple blocks from City Hall, or the ones practically spitting distance from right here.
Every class and every race and every religion and every sexual orientation, everybody's every body, shoulder to shoulder.
This f****** city. Eight million people. Every one of them can be killed.
Chicky looks across to the park's dark that's broken up only by streetlamps along roadways and footpaths. To Chicky these pools of light seem to increase the menace more than lessen it, drawing attention to just how little safety is out there. Even here on fancy Central Park West with fancier Fifth Avenue on the far side, on these streets that are homes to millionaires and billionaires and the biggest museums of the greatest city in the whole wide world. Even here, danger is right over there.
This is one of the main reasons Chicky's job exists to begin with.
Ensuring safety. Trying to.
Chicky has been here for twenty-eight years. Longer than anyone else on staff, longer than most of the residents too. Chicky is who comes to mind when people think of a doorman at the Bohemia, residents and visitors and regular guests, the extended families who descend each Thanksgiving to watch the parade. In all these people's mental dictionaries, the definition of doorman is Chicky Diaz in his spotless uniform and bell crown cap. He's woven into the fabric of the place.
The job suits him. Chicky is always quick with a smile or a joke or the door. He never hesitates to grab a bag or hail a cab, to gently shoo away gawkers or panhandlers, to commiserate about the Mets or the Nets or even the godforsaken Jets.
Chicky is not a particularly religious man but he does believe in god, and it's obvious that he has forsaken the Jets for some unknowable reason. It seems impossible for any sports franchise to be so bad for so long. Espe- cially a team that plays in a major market. The majorest. And yet.
Mysterious ways, they say.
Chicky never fails to remember a resident's name or a visiting grandson or a close friend or "friend." He never calls in sick, never leaves early, never arrives late. He never complains or rolls his eyes at a ridiculous request, of which there are plenty. He is unerringly patient and unfailingly nice. He is relentlessly upbeat.
Or he was.
On the next block a tiny old woman is walking a tiny dog, both miniatures. But otherwise there's nothing but red traffic lights and red taillights and a red light at the end of an awning to beckon a yellow cab. Good luck, this day and age. Taxis don't roam like they used to.
Somewhere a car guns its engine in a way that sounds hostile. Chicky feels a tingle on the back of his clean-cut neck.
Every place to kill someone is also, obviously, a place to get killed. It can happen out on the sidewalk in a hail of automatic gunfire, the murder attempt of a coward who's sitting safely in the passenger side, random bullets hitting thighs and butts and arms but mostly trash cans and windows and innocent passersby. Sometimes little kids, babies.
It's surprising how many gunshot targets manage to survive the indiscriminate spray. Not the one well-placed bullet to the head. No one survives that. But that requires a whole different set of balls. To walk right up to a guy, maybe even look him in the eye, boom.
It can happen at any moment, anywhere, to anyone. Right here, right now. You might never know that you're about to get killed. You might never know that you're about to kill someone.
Chicky sure as f*** hadn't.
The Doorman by Chris Pavone. Published by MCD x FSG, May 20, 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Chris Pavone. All rights reserved.
