92Y's Read By

Tessa Hadley on her selection:

Deidre Madden is an Irish novelist whose books I love. Her writing has a beautiful lucidity and simplicity of style, free of all affectation; her stories begin so naturally and easily, and yet can take the reader down into the deepest - and sometimes the darkest - places. The lovely conceit of her novel Molly Fox's Birthday is that the writer has swapped homes, for a few weeks, with her best friend Molly Fox, a successful actor. What a brilliant invention - and yet so inevitable, now that Madden has thought of it! So the narrator, who is herself a playwright, wakes up on this first morning in the other woman's house in her absence: among her things, inside the shape of her life - and also inevitably, as time passes, among Molly's friends too, and caught up in the complex net of Molly's relations. It's such a richly intriguing way of exploring a life and telling a life-story.

Molly Fox’s Birthday at Bookshop.org

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Yiyun Li on her selection:

Some writers are good to be read in one mood but not another, some are good during one specific period but not another. The writers one can read at any moment are those who refuse to have a simplified relationship with their time. James Alan McPherson is one of them. I often return to his work for clarity; few writers' words can always do the work of mental Visine as well as his. What he wrote in this essay—"In my private view, some things were of greater importance than others...I wanted to do something for myself, outside of any group involvement, something private but also right according to my own scale of values"—has always been a guidance for my own writing. 

A Region Not Home 

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

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 shipwreck felt so culturally apt too. I think we are at sea. 

The Man Who Laughs at Bookshop.org

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

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 in his own right—Rimbaud reborn in Martinique, a mere quarter of a century after his death. He is also, in my eyes, the great poet of agency, and of promise: "there is room for all at the meeting-place of conquest," he writes in Return to My Native Land. "We know now... that every star falls at our command from the sky to the earth without limit." Exit old ghosts.

Return to My Native Land, trans. Anna Bostock and John Berger at Archipelago Books

"Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Isabella Hammad on her selection:

Prisoner of Love is Jean Genet’s strange, recursive, resistant chronicle of the time he spent in the early 1970s with the Palestinian fedayeen in the refugee camps in Jordan. Edward Said called it “a seismographic reading, drawing and exposing the fault lines that a largely normal surface had hidden.” Throughout the book Genet meditates on the Black Panthers, whom he had visited in March 1970, just a few months prior to joining the Palestinians. In each context he describes feeling like a “dreamer inside a dream"; in each context he felt at home. He considers the similarities of the movements--both peoples are deprived of territory from which to launch their revolutions, and therefore rely on spectacle to assert themselves. But spectacle is transitory, and sometimes shades into illusion. Spectacle, says Genet, is  “the product of despair.”

Prisoner of Love at Bookshop.org

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Ada Limón on her selection:

I chose to read poems by Alejandra Pizarnik, from her book Extracting the Stone of Madness, translated by Yvette Siegert, who has done a marvelous job. I believe Pizarnik, an Argentinian author who died in 1972 at the young age of thirty-six, is largely not well-known in the United States—I highly recommend looking her up and spending time with her. During this pandemic, I have found a lot of grace—and despair—in her poems. I find them very helpful, and very beautiful.

Extracting the Stone of Madness at Bookshop.org

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Francisco Goldman on his selection:

My reading is from Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Pnin.  Timofey Pnin, Russian emigre professor at Wainsdell College somewhere in the Northeast, has belatedly just learned to drive, and has undertaken the drive to the summer house of the wealthy emigre Alexandr Petrovich Kukolnikov, otherwise known as Al Cook.  There other emigre intellectuals, artists, liberals, etc, are gathered.  Lonely Pnin, often a figure of fun, has sat down to relax a bit after trouncing his competitors in croquet, when he experiences one of those episodes of nervous or even cardiac unease that in this novel signals a dissolving of the separation of past and present. This passage is about how those we've lost return; how in an idyllic-seeming present, the monstrousness of the past can still, at least momentarily, grip our hearts again; how loss and the past, both monstrous and sweet, permeate the present.  

Pnin at Bookshop.org

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

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 the poignancy of all the characters involved.  Trevor is a wonder in his ability to portray characters without his own judgment ever intervening, he just tells us what we need to know—and then we can weep as well.

A Bit on the Side at Bookshop.org

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Geoff Dyer on his selection:

I've chosen two passages, both about place. The first is from the start of D. H. Lawrence’s essay, "Taos," published in 1923. Lawrence had arrived in New Mexico with his wife Frieda at the invitation of Mabel Dodge in September the previous year. As was his way, Lawrence began making  pronouncements about the place almost from the moment he arrived. The second passage is from "The Country and the City" by Raymond Williams, published fifty years later, in 1973. It’s from the chapter where Williams discusses the magnificent country houses or stately homes that are such beautiful—and persistently alluring—features of the English countryside.  

The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays of D.H. Lawrence, edited by Geoff Dyer at Bookshop.org

The Country and the City by Raymond Williams at Bookshop.org

Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Jennifer Egan on her selection:

The House of Mirth was the first literary classic that I picked up entirely on my own, without prodding from a teacher or a parent, and adored.  I read it as a teenager, during a stifling summer visit to my grandparents, when my literary tastes were unsophisticated (Archie comics were high on my list).  I recall the experience as my coming-of-age as a reader—when I learned, years before discovering that I wanted to write, what transformative power a work of fiction can have.  Because my attachment to The House of Mirth is so personal, I tend to reread it with slight trepidation that the magic may have fled.  But each time, I find the novel’s tragic power intact, even as the nature of the tragedy seems to shift—from the perils of living by one’s looks (teenage reading) to the cruelty of the world toward women (young adult reading) to the struggle for personal freedom in a money-obsessed culture (adult readings) to my most recent (middle-aged, I’ll reluctantly call it) appreciation of the novel as an artifact of the Gilded Age that lays bare that era’s pathologies.  All of which moves me to assert that Edith Wharton’s second novel is a masterpiece, a pinnacle of American letters that remains electrifying and relevant in our 21st Century.

The House of Mirth with an introduction by Jennifer Egan at Bookshop.org 

Music: “Shift of Currents” by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0