Read By: Joseph O'Neill

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Read By: Joseph O'Neill

From92Y's Read By

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Length:

10 minutes

Released:

Dec 13, 2020

Format:

Podcast episode

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Joseph O’Neill on his selection: I chose to read from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Pnin, a book I turn to very often when I need a tonic. Pnin at Bookshop.org Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Released:

Dec 13, 2020

Format:

Podcast episode

Titles in the series (83)

A new podcast where today’s finest writers read the work that matters to them—from their homes, to yours. Produced and commissioned by the 92nd Street Y's Unterberg Poetry Center, a home for live readings of literature for over 80 years.

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Read By: Billy Collins: Billy Collins on his selection: I chose poems from William Matthews (1942-1997) and Thomas Lux (1946-2017) because I wanted to honor two fallen soldiers who fought for an increase of beauty and truth in the world, who also knew that a good poem must... by 92Y's Read By
6 min listen
Read By: Terrance Hayes: Terrance Hayes on his selection: I'm reading two poems by Wanda Coleman to celebrate the April publication of her selected poems, : “Things No One Knows” and “American Sonnet #54.”  I’m also reading two of my poems in conversation with... by 92Y's Read By
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Read By: Ann Patchett: Ann Patchett on her selection: I picked this story when I was the editor of Best American Short Stories in 2006. Katrina Kenison, who was the series editor, was a huge Edith Pearlman fan and gave me a lot of choices. The hardest part was choosing just... by 92Y's Read By
22 min listen
Read By: Jonathan Franzen: Jonathan Franzen on his selection: Vasily Grossman's towering achievement, Life and Fate, is a product of his unique access to every aspect of the Soviet society during the Second World War. Though he would soon fall out of favor with Stalin and would... by 92Y's Read By
19 min listen
Read By: James Shapiro: James Shapiro on his selection: A few years ago, I spent many months researching plague in Shakespeare’s London—how it was misunderstood, the terrible toll it took on the population (wiping our nearly a sixth of Londoners in 1593, and again in... by 92Y's Read By
13 min listen
Read By: Hisham Matar: Hisham Matar on his selection: In 2016, when I finished writing my book, The Return, which chronicles my return to Libya after 33 years of not being able to go there for political reasons, and my failed search for my father, a Libyan political... by 92Y's Read By
28 min listen
Read By: Lauren Groff: Lauren Groff on her selection: I've long loved "Sredni Vashtar" for its fury and wildness, and for its profound understanding of the human needs for religious reverence, ceremony, and vengeance. Poor sickly Conradin is a full, complete, utterly... by 92Y's Read By
14 min listen
Read By: Margaret Atwood: "Once upon a time, you say, there were germs with horns. They lived in the toilet and could only be defeated by gallons and gallons of bleach. You could commit suicide by drinking this bleach, and some women did." Margaret Atwood reads "Our Cat Enters... by 92Y's Read By
14 min listen
Read By: Louise Erdrich: Louise Erdrich on her selections:   We have become isolated and strangely passive in many ways during this pandemic. These poems shake the reader into clarity and reassure us that our true natures, our most elegant passions, will one day again be... by 92Y's Read By
28 min listen
Read By: Colm Tóibín: Colm Tóibín on his selection: When W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory met at the end of the nineteenth century, she, thirteen years his senior, had published very little. She was a widow living in a large house called Coole Park in County Galway in West... by 92Y's Read By
13 min listen
Read By: Robert Hass and Jorie Graham: Jorie Graham on Linda Gregg: Reading Linda Gregg’s poems is a unique experience because not only does one hear Linda’s voice in one’s head—if one ever heard her read it was unforgettable—but the voice is actually inscribed into the lines,... by 92Y's Read By
12 min listen
Read By: George Saunders: George Saunders on his selection: There are a few passages in literature that I go back to whenever I’m feeling out of touch with something I know to be true, namely that the whole point of life (even, and especially, during, a pandemic) is to get... by 92Y's Read By
10 min listen
Read By: Lila Azam Zanganeh: Lila Azam Zanganeh on her selection: Césaire speaks to me, a French-born Iranian, as the poet of migration and metissage, but also as the poet of longing for a home destroyed out of recognition. Césaire is the rare political poet who is an alchemist... by 92Y's Read By
11 min listen
Read By: David Mitchell: David Mitchell on his selection: I hope you’re well, whoever you are, wherever you are. If my readings were songs on a playlist, I’d call it "A Winter, Some Ghosts and The Summer." I hope you enjoy it, and I hope to revisit New York soon. 1) John... by 92Y's Read By
31 min listen
Read By: Rachel Cusk: Rachel Cusk on her selection: Tennyson’s In Memoriam crops up in the dullest Victorian stretches of an English Literature degree, and so the glimmering self-utterance that stutters into life across its (intimidating) number of lyric sequences has... by 92Y's Read By
7 min listen
Read By: Nicole Krauss: Nicole Krauss on her selection: I recently finished a collection of short stories, and while writing it I sometimes turned to Leonard Michaels to remember what's possible in the form, and to rest in his fluency. “Isaac” is from Michaels’s first... by 92Y's Read By
9 min listen
Read By: Gary Shteyngart: Gary Shteyngart on his selection: Nothing has ever made me happier than reading Mo Willems to my kid. In these troubled times, when we can no longer see our friends, we need more of Gerald and Piggy and their incredible pachyderm-porcine friendship. by 92Y's Read By
4 min listen
Read By: Elif Batuman: Elif Batuman on her selection: I chose to read from Epictetus because he has always made me feel better at times when I have felt anxious about things outside of my control. Basically, Epictetus transforms “things out of my control” from something... by 92Y's Read By
16 min listen
Read By: Michael Chabon: Michael Chabon on his selection: Reading Ray Bradbury’s “The Rocket Man” for the first time—around the age of ten or eleven—was the first time I realized that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot but of language. Not... by 92Y's Read By
28 min listen
Read By: Nicole Cecilia Delgado: Nicole Cecilia Delgado on her selection: Conocí a Ámbar Past hace más o menos diez años en San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, en donde me quedé a vivir dos años. Fue una maestra esencial, no solo de cómo hacer libros de poesía, sino de... by 92Y's Read By
4 min listen
Read By: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky on their selections: Chekhov’s story “The Beggar” was written in 1887, when Chekhov was 27. This was the moment in his life when he was turning from his early comic sketches to something a bit more serious.... by 92Y's Read By
22 min listen
Read By: Meg Wolitzer: Meg Wolitzer on her selection: I chose this story because it’s such an intuitive and ruefully funny close-up of a marriage. My mother, Hilma Wolitzer, looks at the often desperate ways that partners keep each other going; this can be a lifelong... by 92Y's Read By
18 min listen
Read By: Neil Gaiman: Neil Gaiman on his selection: I chose this story because I cannot get it out of my head. Sometimes it feels like every argument we have, every discussion, every idea, is about balancing joy and misery. Omelas is a utopia for thousands built on the... by 92Y's Read By
22 min listen
Read By: Dunya Mikhail: Dunya Mikhail on her selection: My translation of this poem by Louise Glück, the 2020 Nobel Laureate in Literature, is part of my continuous work to translate contemporary American poetry into Arabic. Like the rest of Louise Glück’s poetry,... by 92Y's Read By
14 min listen
Read By: Roxane Gay: Roxane Gay on her selection: There is this thing that happens, all too often, when a black woman is being introduced in a professional setting. Her accomplishments tend to be diminished. The introducer might laugh awkwardly, rushing through whatever... by 92Y's Read By
10 min listen
Read By: Caryl Phillips: Caryl Phillips on his selection: It’s over thirty years since I first came upon the work of C.P. Cavafy. A friend of mine, a Polish poet, had recommended Cavafy’s Collected Poems translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. I worried a little... by 92Y's Read By
6 min listen
Read By: Claudia Rankine: Claudia Rankine on her selection: This untitled poem, by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, was written in November of 1937. He was living in Paris, having traveled back from Spain, and he was working on what would become the posthumous poems. He... by 92Y's Read By
4 min listen
Read By: Eileen Myles: Eileen Myles on their selection: I picked this book off a shelf in a small place I was staying in Provincetown this summer. I'd never read Victor Hugo and found his writing so painterly and lush and philosophical and yet confoundingly graphic. A... by 92Y's Read By
24 min listen
Read By: Elizabeth Strout: Elizabeth Strout on her selection: William Trevor is brilliant at capturing the nuances of many people's perspectives, all in one story, as he does in this story of a young woman is who just reaching adulthood.  We see her sorrows, confusions, and... by 92Y's Read By
24 min listen
Read By: Rivka Galchen: Rivka Galchen on her selection: I chose this story because it deals with anxieties both rational and irrational. I love the way the narrator of this story works so hard to be cheerful. We see the labor, sometimes absurd, sometimes heroic, that goes... by 92Y's Read By
24 min listen

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Read By: Kenzie Allen: Kenzie Allen on her selection: Growing up, I spent precious time each summer on a fire lookout, Sand Mountain, in the Oregon Cascades, and I still return there to volunteer with my father, as happened just last week. Each time I read “deer crowd up... by 92Y's Read By
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Read By: Alexandra Zuckerman: Alexandra Zuckerman on her selection: In her book, On Beauty and Being Just, it is as if, in Elaine Scarry’s view, the external world has the power to tumultuously expose to us our errors of judgment; wrong beliefs cannot merely be held. Her small... by 92Y's Read By
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Read By: Mag Gabbert: Mag Gabbert on her selection: I read Kathryn Nuernberger's essay "A Thin Blue Line," which comes from her wonderful collection of essayettes, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. I return to these pieces often because they give me new ideas about... by 92Y's Read By
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Read By: Ina Cariño: Ina Cariño on her selection: Aracelis Girmay’s “You are Who I Love,” first published in 2017, is still so, so needed today. The repetition of the title throughout the poem gives it a musicality that mimics the chants of those who march in the... by 92Y's Read By
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Read By: Tracie Morris: Tracie Morris on her selection: I have the great pleasure of sharing small excerpts from Brent Hayes Edwards’ wonderful book, Epistrophies. In it, I repeat a quote from the legendary Mary Lou Williams to introduce Edward’s commentary on Sun Ra at... by 92Y's Read By
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Read By: Rowan Ricardo Phillips: Rowan Ricardo Phillips on his selection: The poem "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison'' was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the summer of 1797. He had been set to journey the Quantocks with a group of friends but burned his foot in an accident and... by 92Y's Read By
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Read By: Sheila Heti: Sheila Heti on her selection: I chose a chapter from Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, which he wrote between 1934 and 1941. It is one of the most fascinating and vivid descriptions I have ever read—not only of what Victorian manners and... by 92Y's Read By
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Read By: Tobias Wolff: Tobias Wolff on his selection: I read three poems, two by my longtime friend and colleague, Eavan Boland, who died last year, a loss that I feel still. There is a tradition in Irish poetry, inflected by the long Independence movement and a certain... by 92Y's Read By
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Read By: Joseph O'Neill

Read By: Joseph O'Neill

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Titles in the series (83)

More Episodes from 92Y's Read By