Three great books, three great conversations leading up to Ghost Ship: A Pocket Book Romance on the USS Intrepid.
Our show is a love affair with literature; so before Ghost Ship opens, we’re reading together.
Ghost Ship draws on the Armed Services Editions as thematic material: the slim, pocket-sized paperbacks the U.S. military gave away free to troops during World War II. This club reads the history of that remarkable program, the Brooklyn novel that servicemen devoured, and a novel that was banned at home yet still shipped overseas.
Come for the books. Stay for the conversation, led by an English professor who dances with us.
We’d love to gather in person, and there will be a Zoom option, too.
When you sign up, tell us whether you’ll join in person or on Zoom. We’ll email you more information, including where we’ll meet.
Sign UpOne history, two novels, all three tied to the paperbacks at the heart of Ghost Ship
The story of how publishers, librarians, and the War Department answered the Nazi book burnings by putting well over a hundred million books into the hands of American troops, in pockets and rucksacks in every theater of the war.
Start here. This is the history of the Armed Services Editions, the pocket paperbacks at the heart of Ghost Ship.
Francie Nolan comes of age in the tenements of turn-of-the-century Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in a novel of hardscrabble family life that became one of the signature books of the war.
An immediate sensation with servicemen. Smith reportedly received sacks of fan mail from the field, and the Armed Services Edition printing was doubled within a year.
Smith’s debut novel follows a doomed interracial love affair in a small Georgia town and the community that closes around it. A bestseller in 1944, it was banned in Boston and Detroit and briefly barred from the U.S. mail, and it still went to war.
Not every book sent overseas was a comfortable one. Strange Fruit deals frankly with racism and racial violence, and it reminds us that the “war of ideas” was fought at home as well as abroad.
Armed Services Editions were issued by the Council on Books in Wartime, whose slogan said it plainly: “Books are weapons in the war of ideas.”
They were small enough to fit a cargo pocket and cheap enough to give away by the millions. Troops read them to tatters, shared single copies between two readers, and wrote home to the authors.
Want more? Our research dossier on the Armed Services Editions follows each title back to Intrepid’s own war.
Read the Sea Bag Library
April 30 – May 8, 2027 · MATCH, Houston
Ghost Ship: A Pocket Book Romance on the USS Intrepid is Open Dance Project’s new immersive production, a wartime romance that takes audiences back to World War II aboard the USS Intrepid. Tickets coming soon.
Open Dance Project company member · resident English professor
Cara is originally from Massachusetts. She graduated summa cum laude from the Ailey-Fordham B.F.A. Program with degrees in Dance and Comparative Literature, then joined Graham 2 and the Martha Graham Dance Company, where she remained for five years. She has also danced with the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company.
She earned an M.A. in English Literature from the City College of New York, where she was previously a lecturer in the English Department. She has taught Graham Technique at the Martha Graham Center, Peridance, and the Ailey School, and has performed with CRDance, Tabula Rasa Dance Theater, and Lydia Johnson Dance.
Now based in Houston, Cara is an Open Dance Project company member and our resident English professor. She will lead each of the three conversations.
Our favorite independent bookstore in the Heights is offering a discount to club members.
250 W 19th Street, Suite D, Houston Heights, Houston, TX 77008
(713) 485-6014
Book club members receive 10% off the three titles.
Visit Good on PaperThree books. Three Saturdays. One very good conversation.
Join the Book Club