Established 2022

Meet Paging Creatives, an online book club designed for small business owners in the creative fields. Each month, we select one book from a mix of creatively-themed fiction, business books, biographies, and memoirs to explore. Engage with our selections to spark your inspiration and connect with like-minded creatives during our live online book chat, held on Zoom on the last Tuesday of every month at 8 pm ET. This page lists our monthly selections; please click the button under each month to join the chat. You're welcome to join our discussions anytime—here’s to celebrating creativity and shared inspiration!

By Oscar Wilde

A talented artist captures Dorian Gray’s otherworldly beauty in a portrait that seems to hold more power than either of them understands. When Dorian falls under the spell of a man who worships pleasure above conscience, he wishes for the painting to bear the weight of age and corruption in his place. As he slips deeper into temptation, the portrait twists into a grotesque reflection of every choice he hides behind his perfect face. This novel lingers in the shadows of art, desire, and the terrible price of trading one’s soul for eternal beauty.

By: Fredrik Backman

An aspiring artist becomes captivated by three tiny figures tucked into the corner of a famous painting, sensing a hidden story. Her search leads her across the country and back to a seaside summer twenty-five years earlier, when a group of teenagers found refuge, love, and purpose on an abandoned pier. As she uncovers the lives behind the brushstrokes, the painting transforms into a guide that reshapes her understanding of what was created and what was lost. This novel honors the quiet power of friendship and the way art preserves the moments that shape us.

With our Members

It’s time for the annual end-of-year celebration for Paging Creatives. This virtual gathering is a chance for members to unwind together, share their standout reads of the year, and reflect on the personal and professional moments that defined 2026. We’ll look ahead to the new year with intention, inspiration, and a few big dreams for the seasons to come. Settle in with something warm and join us for a relaxed evening celebrating books, creativity, and this community we’ve built together.

By Nathalia Holt

In the 1930s, Walt Disney’s studio sent rejection letters telling aspiring artists that women did not do creative work. A small group of women came anyway, starting in the ink and paint department and working their way into the story rooms and animation desks where the films took shape. Their sketches, color, and storyboards helped define Fantasia, Bambi, Cinderella, and Peter Pan. This true story reveals the artists behind some of Disney’s most familiar images, and what it cost them to make work the world rarely credited to them.

By B.A. Shapiro

In 1940 New York, Alizée Benoit paints murals for the WPA alongside rising artists like Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. As war spreads across Europe and she fights to save her family in occupied France, Alizée suddenly vanishes. Decades later, her great-niece, an art appraiser at Christie’s, discovers small paintings hidden behind famous Abstract Expressionist canvases that may finally reveal what happened. This novel shows how art can keep a story alive long after its maker is gone.

By Emily Franklin

When Isabella Stewart arrives in Boston as a young bride, the city’s elite society never quite lets her in. Rather than shrink to fit, she fills her life with art, travel, and friendships with artists and writers like John Singer Sargent and Henry James, building one of the most remarkable collections of her time. Her boldest act is a Venetian-style palazzo museum, created to share her treasures with the public. This novel shows how one woman turned a passion for art into a lasting legacy.

By Sarah Winman

In the summer of 1944, among the ruins of a Tuscan villa, a young British soldier named Ulysses Temper meets Evelyn Skinner, an English art historian in her sixties who has come to help rescue Italy’s treasures from the war. Their brief encounter changes the course of his life. Years later, Ulysses makes a new home in Florence with a small, unlikely family, surrounded by the city’s art, its light, and its people. This novel celebrates how beauty and friendship can shape an entire life.

By Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross

Why does a song lift your mood, or a painting stop you in your tracks? Susan Magsamen, who leads the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins, and Ivy Ross, Google’s vice president of hardware design, explore the science behind that feeling. Drawing on research in neuroaesthetics, they show how making and experiencing art can ease stress, sharpen learning, and strengthen our connections with each other. This book makes the case that art is not a luxury, but something we need.

By Dawn Tripp

In 1916, a young art teacher named Georgia O’Keeffe learns that her charcoal drawings are hanging in a New York gallery without her permission. The man who hung them is Alfred Stieglitz, the famous photographer, who becomes her champion, her lover, and the lens through which the world first sees her. As critics read their own meanings into her bold flowers, Georgia fights to define her work on her own terms, finding her truest voice in the desert of New Mexico. This novel captures an artist claiming her own vision.

By Joe Tucker

Eric Tucker was the uncle everyone knew for his jokes, his daily trips to the bookie, and the fact that he lived with his mother for almost eighty years. After his death, his family discovered more than five hundred paintings of pubs, street life, and performers from England’s industrial north. A museum retrospective drew record visitors, and critics compared him to L.S. Lowry, calling his work a significant contribution to modern British art. His nephew sets out to understand the man behind it all.

By Marty Neumeier

Hired to authenticate paintings found beneath the floorboards of an Italian townhouse, a biophysicist named Scarlett and a retired art historian named Artie also uncover a manuscript written by Leonardo da Vinci’s young pupil. It tells how Leonardo set out to solve a gruesome murder at a Venetian printing press, or risk never seeing his notebooks published. Determined to keep the manuscript out of their client’s private vault, the two mismatched women steal it and race across northern Italy to share it with the world.

by Mason Currey

Beethoven counted out exactly sixty coffee beans for each cup. Kafka wrote late into the night after long days at an insurance office. Agatha Christie never had a desk. Mason Currey gathers the daily routines of 161 painters, writers, composers, and thinkers, showing how they carved out time, managed distractions, and kept showing up to the work. This book offers a fascinating look at the habits behind great creative output, and how different each path can be.

by Geoffrey Kelly

On March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers talked their way into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and walked out with thirteen works of art, including masterpieces by Vermeer and Rembrandt. The empty frames still hang on the museum’s walls, and the case remains unsolved. Geoffrey Kelly, the FBI agent who spent years leading the investigation, takes readers inside the hunt through mob ties, false leads, and lingering hope. This true story reveals why the world’s largest art heist still matters.

by Dave Eggers

Cricket Dib is a quiet kid on the American prairie until he discovers he can draw, and meets Olympia Argyros, a brilliant, worldly girl a year older who sees exactly what his talent could become. So begins a sixty-five-year friendship, partnership, and love story that carries them from Indiana to New York, Paris, and beyond. Along the way, they try to start their own art movement while navigating the art world’s markets, trends, and charlatans. This novel asks what it truly means to live as an artist.

by Christine Coulson

Written by a twenty-five-year veteran writer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this novel tells the entire life of Kitty Whitaker, a fictional New York heiress born in 1906, entirely through short museum wall labels. Her style, history, and multiple marriages are described as if she were a precious artifact being appraised, displayed, and passed from collection to collection. The novel turns a museum’s language back on itself to ask what a woman’s life is truly worth.