The Table of Four
by Lynne Jeter
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Description
Author(s)
Lynne Jeter
Related Titles
| Publisher | Post Hill Press |
| Publication | Mar 16, 2027 |
| Format | Paperback/Softback |
| ISBN | 979-8895659267 |
| Pages | 208 |
| Age | Adult 18+ |
| Price | $19.99 |
The Table of Four
A richly reported portrait of American women’s social life, community, and resilience—told through the game that has gathered them around a table for a century.
What happens when four women sit down to play mahjong? Everything. Secrets. Rivalries. Grief. Laughter. Lifelong friendship. And occasionally, a little drama over who discarded the wrong tile.
In The Table of Four, award-winning journalist Lynne Jeter takes readers inside the world of American mahjong—a game that has quietly anchored women’s social lives for a hundred years and has survived cancel culture, a tile revolution, and a scandalous card fiasco that shook its most powerful institution to its core.
Drawing on extensive interviews with players, historians, entrepreneurs, and insiders—including the son of the woman who built the modern American mahjong game with The Card—Lynne traces mahjong from its Chinese origins through the living rooms of Jewish New Yorkers, the country clubs of the South, and the pandemic-era boom that brought millions of new players to the table across America. Along the way, she discovers what the game has always really been about: the hunger for connection, the rituals that hold communities together, and what women reveal—and conceal—when they think they’re just playing a game.
The Table of Four is a celebration, an investigation, and an invitation. Pull up a chair.
Author
Lynne Jeter
Lynne Jeter is an award-winning business journalist who began writing in 1988, with nearly forty years of experience covering economic development, corporate culture, foreign direct investment, and the human stories behind them all. A graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi and alumna of graduate programs at Belhaven University and Western Carolina University, she brings both rigorous academic grounding and decades of field reporting to her work.
She is the author of Disconnected: Deceit and Betrayal at WorldCom (John Wiley & Sons, 2003. The work demonstrated her ability to combine rigorous reporting, narrative drive, and inside access, and was selected for required and recommended reading in graduate-level business ethics courses around the globe.
A two-time Mississippi SBA Small Business Journalist of the Year, Lynne has written for local, national, and international publications, spending years honing her skills at the intersection of business, culture, and community. She has exclusive access to C-suite executives and has copresented legislative seminars alongside state lawmakers—including Mississippi Senate Technology Committee Chair Bart Williams and AI expert Chris Chism—on shaping policy for the emerging artificial intelligence sector.
Lynne is the founding travel editor of SOUTH Magazine and has written for Pace-produced Airways Magazine, Northwest Airlines’ WorldTraveler, Southern Accents, and Biltmore, where she contributed the coveted lead essay in the magazine’s premiere edition.
An avid mahjong player and certified instructor, Lynne brings to The Table of Four something no outside observer could: the insider’s fluency of someone who has sat at enough tables to recognize every personality, every dynamic, and every unspoken rule of the game within the game.