92Y's Read By

Garth Greenwell on his selection:

This essay is a marvel. From the tiniest, the most banal drama—a writer is distracted from her book by the fluttering of a moth at the window—Virginia Woolf distills one of the most penetrating explorations I know of the eternal questions: What does it mean to live? What does it mean to die? Woolf’s sentences are glorious, ostentatious, baroque, austere. How can an essay on death be finally so profound and joyful an affirmation of life? The essay is three or four pages long. It's one of the grandest things I know in literature.

The Death of the Moth and Other Essays at Bookshop.org

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

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 impoverished remarks they have prepared. Rarely do they do the necessary research to offer any sense of whom they are introducing. The black woman is spoken of in terms of anecdote rather than accomplishment. She is referred to as sassy on Twitter, maybe, or as a lover of bacon, random tidbits bearing no relation to the reasons why she is in that professional setting. Whenever this happens to me or I witness it happening to another black woman, I turn to Audre Lorde. I wonder how Lorde would respond to such a micro-aggression because in her prescient writings she demonstrated, time and again, a remarkable and necessary ability to stand up for herself, her intellectual prowess and that of all black women, with power and grace. She recognized the importance of speaking up because silence would not protect her or anyone. She recognized that there would never be a perfect time to speak up because, “while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”

Drawn from her editor's introduction to The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, forthcoming this fall. Pre-order at Bookshop.org.

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

On Adam Gopnik's selection:

“'How are we to live in an atomic age?' I am tempted to reply: 'Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.' In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation."

- from "On Living in an Atomic Age," by C. S. Lewis, anthologized in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays.

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

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 work. The characters’ dream of moving from the congested city to the seemingly peaceful suburbs remains alive yet unrealized, a shared fantasy that almost drives them apart. I love “Sundays” for how slyly subversive and honest it is.

"Sundays" at Esquire

An Available Man at Bookshop.org

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

"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 Heaven," "Chicken Little Goes Too Far" and "Winter's Tales" from her collection of modern fables, The Tent.

The Tent at Bookshop.org

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

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 I have to worry extra about, into something I get to be proud of myself for not worrying about at all! For Epictetus, freeing ourselves from worry is a heroic feat, like being in the Olympics. I wrote about him once here.

Discourses and Selected Writings at Bookshop.org

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

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 called into the world.

“Manhattan is a Lenape Word” and “If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert,” by Natalie Diaz

“Praise the Rain,” by Joy Harjo

“The Museum of Stones" and “Letter to a City Under Siege,” by Carolyn Forché

“A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function” and “Loving that Land O’Lakes Girl,” by Eric Gansworth

“Public Grief” and “The Coldness Was Coldness,” by Heid E. Erdrich

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 misery, and the knowledge of the misery, of one. It is an exercise in complicity: Le Guin makes us create her joyous city with her. We build it in our head.

And then it destroys us, and she destroys us, and we are forced to think about what we made in our heads, and how it stacks up against the imperfect world we live in. 

Let us all march to a place that may not be there at all.

The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories at IndieBound

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

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. But the comedy is still there, of course.  We chose it because it is essentially a dialogue between a successful, well-off lawyer and a ne’er-do-well. It has a delightful surprise ending. 

For our second text, we’ve chosen two passages from “The Pearl Necklace” by Nikolai Leskov. Leskov is one of the great masters of Russian storytelling, from the generation between Tolstoy/Dostoevsky and Chekhov. In fact, Chekhov was introduced to him in Moscow in 1883, and they got along well, though Leskov could be difficult. Chekhov has even been called Leskov’s successor.  

Again, we’ve chosen passages that are dialogues—this time, even more appropriately, between a husband and wife. 

Fifty-Two Stories at IndieBound

The Enchanted Wanderer at IndieBound

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

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 dissident who was imprisoned and made to disappear by the Qaddafi dictatorship, I went to Siena. I spent a month in that Tuscan city looking at paintings from the Sienese School, which covers the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. These paintings have interested me ever since I had first encountered them at the National Gallery in London, some quarter of a century before, when I was nineteen, the year my father was abducted. The time spent in Siena produced my latest book, A Month in Siena, which is a record of my looking at the paintings, but also a mediation on loss, love, intimacy and art. It is also a book about solitude and its surprises. I wanted to read to you from a section that expresses this as well as the joys of the accidental social encounter. In a time where we are isolated and told, for good reasons, to be wary of the possibility of being contaminated by one another, I thought it fitting to share with you some of those common old joys of spontaneous and unexpected human encounters. And finally, because we are barred from travel, I wanted to take you away, to go travelling in the imagination together.  

A Month in Siena at IndieBound

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