Join co-hosts Anne Moore and Chris Stacey for an innovative, exciting, and passionate approach to world literature. Our current city is New York City during "The Gilded Age." For our third meeting we discuss the contemporary non-fiction selection The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars by Paul Collins.

On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. The police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era’s most perplexing murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus, as their rival newspapers the World and the Journal raced to solve the crime. The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale—a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that forever changed newspaper journalism.

Date: Thursday, July 16, 2026

Time: 6:00PM Central

Location: Book Club Member's Home

Event Wait List: Please email Chris at [email protected] to join our wait list. Club members receive top priority.

Cost: $15 suggested donation to cover dinner and beverages.

Reviews

[Collins’] exploration of the newspaper world, at the very moment when tabloid values were being born, is revealing but also enormously entertaining….Collins has a clear eye, a good sense of telling detail, and a fine narrative ability.” —Wall Street Journal

“Riveting….Collins has mined enough newspaper clippings and other archives to artfully recreate the era, the crime and the newspaper wars it touched off.” —New York Times

“Wonderfully rich in period detail, salacious facts about the case and infectious wonder at the chutzpah and inventiveness displayed by Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s minions. Both a gripping true-crime narrative and an astonishing portrait of fin de siecle yellow journalism.” —Kirkus Reviews