92Y's Read By

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 more loving, more tender.  As Tolstoy wrote, “Men think there are circumstances when one may deal with human beings without love. But there are no such circumstances…If you feel no love, sit still. Occupy yourself with things, with yourself, with anything you like, only not with men.”  One my favorite “tenderizing” passages is from Gogol’s great story, “The Overcoat,” and it describes the life of one Akakii Akakievich, a lowly St. Petersburg functionary.

"The Overcoat," at IndieBound

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.

There Is a Bird on Your Head! at IndieBound

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 one. When the book came out we picked three stories to read at the launch party and hired three actors, but the day before the woman who was supposed to read "Self-Reliance" had to cancel. It was my big break. I sat in my hotel room in Boston and read the story twenty times. I have never enjoyed a reading so much. Because of that I became very bonded to Edith and her work. I wrote an introduction to her new and selected stories Binocular Vision and promoted it hugely. The book went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. I don't think anything in my life has ever made me so happy.

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 1603), and especially its impact on Shakespeare and on the public theaters, which were ordered closed when weekly plague deaths rose above thirty. I published what I learned in The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. This week I’ve reread those pages, heartbroken. It’s no longer Elizabethan playwrights and actors whose lives and livelihood are endangered, but my close friends in the theater, on both sides of the Atlantic. I’ve consulted on a half-dozen productions set to air this spring and summer; none of them now will, a devastating loss at a time that we need theater most.