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92Y's Read By

92Y's Read By

92Y Unterberg Poetry Center

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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Top 10 92Y's Read By Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best 92Y's Read By episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to 92Y's Read By for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite 92Y's Read By episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

92Y's Read By - Read By: Adam Gopnik
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05/12/20 • 5 min

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

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92Y's Read By - Read By: Catherine Barnett
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01/10/21 • 27 min

Catherine Barnett on her selections:

Because there are so many texts I love and because of the radical adjustments we’ve had to make in the space-time continuum, I chose to curate a small collection of poems and prose excerpts, each of which takes notice of, or is somehow guided by, time. I’ve included the following poems and excerpts; a collection I’m calling “On the Specious Present and the So-Called Obvious Past.”

Philip Larkin, "Days"

From Samuel Beckett's "Texts for Nothing, #3"

Dominique Bechard, "Half a Party"

Gwendolyn Brooks, "An Aspect of Love: Alive in the Fire and Ice"

Guillaume Apollinaire, “There Is” or "Il y a"

Claudia Rankine, "Weather"

John Berger, from "Paul Strand"

Saskia Hamilton, “On. On. Stop. Stop.”

Wislawa Szymborska, "May 16, 1973"

Yiyun Li, from "Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life"

Jean Valentine, “For Love”

Rick Barot, “The Galleons 4”

Ellen Bryant Voigt, “Storm"

Paul Celan, "So many constellations" (trans. Michael Hamburger)

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

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92Y's Read By - Read By: T.C. Boyle

Read By: T.C. Boyle

92Y's Read By

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01/27/21 • 7 min

T.C. Boyle on his selection:

It was Donald Barthelme, along with Robert Coover, Samuel Beckett, Julio Cortázar and Flannery O’Conner who spurred me to be in writing myself. Barthelme is best known for his abstract stories, like “Indian Uprising,” a story I cherish, but I’ve chosen “The School” for this program because of its tight comedic narrative and its presentation as a dramatic monologue. It works by escalation, as much of our humor does. The line, “We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy” always brings down the house. Of course, at its core, the story questions what education--knowledge itself--can do to ease the souls of a species, burdened with the foreknowledge of its own death.

Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme

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

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92Y's Read By - Read By: Sophie Herron
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08/29/21 • 12 min

Sophie Herron on their selection:

Last July, I read John McPhee’s Basin and Range for the first time and was immediately captured by the slim volume—its structure, its fluid sentences, the breadth and depth of its probity and its wry and ever-present humor. The titular basin and range is an area between Utah and California, but the book is as much about geology itself, both the movement of rock and the movement of minds that have studied it. In 1785, a Scottish geologist, James Hutton, presented to the Royal Society a new theory: that landmasses were formed over an indescribable amount of time, and that the evidence of these changes were in the different formations of rocks—where one era of rock met another. I’ve chosen to read McPhee’s accounting of Hutton’s search for this geological evidence; a narrative in which McPhee coins the term “deep time,”—a piece of history writing which, it seems to me, enfolds the transcendent experience of humanity’s tiny place in time and, concurrently, love for the work of discovery, communication, and of changing minds. It has stayed with me in the moments of excruciating ephemerality and eternity in the past year. Sometimes both at once. I hope, as a final episode for Read By, it serves for you, also, as a microscope that explodes.

Basin and Range, by John McPhee

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

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92Y's Read By - Special Re-release: Roxane Gay
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06/02/20 • 9 min

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 Gay's 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

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92Y's Read By - Read By: Caryl Phillips
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05/30/20 • 5 min

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 that, not being a poet, there would not be any real point of connection. However, from the first page I recognized something in Cavafy’s work that struck a chord with me. Cavafy lived between two worlds—the Egyptian and the Greek—and had a complex relationship to the word “home.” He underpinned his work with historical detail and had little interest in the world of publishing. His was an essentially reflective, and reclusive, muse—looking back at time past and wondering about what lay ahead. This seems to be exactly what many of us are now doing. Taking this time to think about how to stitch together our past and present so that when we return to “normal” we might have a more balanced, and purposeful, sense of what we should do with the rest of our lives.

Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy, trans. Keeley and Sherrard at Bookshop.org

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

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92Y's Read By - Read By: Rivka Galchen
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05/28/20 • 23 min

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 into feeling okay with the basics of the world: that time moves, that calamities happen, that our hearts are unreasonable and panicked. Also Cheever describes California palm trees as "disheveled and expatriated" and like "rank upon rank of wet mops"—those incidental accuracies and pleasures are (for me) sunshine. I admire the story for offering a moment of grace—an almost silly one—that I can believe in. At least briefly.

The Stories of John Cheever at Bookshop.org

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

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92Y's Read By - Read By: David Mitchell
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05/21/20 • 31 min

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 Connolly is a contemporary Irish crime writer and fantasist. This is my favourite very short ghost story. Thanks to John for letting me read it here.

2) Wisława Szymborska was a Polish poet, translator and essayist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. This cool shot of vodka of a poem is translated here by Joanna Trzeciak.

3) Henry Cecil was a lawyer and writer from the mid-20th century, mostly forgotten now. This story came from a spooky anthology I owned as a kid, called The House of Nightmare. It has a killer ending...

4) Edward Thomas died in the trenches in 1917. The poem evokes a ‘before the war’ moment, when a golden peace was on borrowed time. The train platform in the poem strikes me as a liminal space between life and death.

5) The Country Child is another book from my childhood about a childhood. I love the animism of the trees in this passage. Alison Uttley also wrote A Traveller in Time. She had a historian’s eye and a poet’s ear.

6) “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” William Wordsworth at his shortest. Having to learn ‘the one about the daffodils’ at school bleached Wordsworth for my generation. Discovering this poem, a few years later, put the colour back in.

7) I found James Wright’s collection The Branch Will Not Break in Auckland, NZ on my first visit to the country as a published author. I loved it then and I love it now. On the face of it, the final line from “Lying in a Hammock...” is a downer: why do I find it so uplifting?

8) Ursula K. Le Guin woke up my hunger to write narrative, and to (try to) make other people feel what this novel made me feel. Most hungers consume, but the writing-hunger sustains. I didn’t know Ursula well, but we emailed occasionally. She was sharp, funny and gracious, and the world is a little less magical now she’s no longer in it. Luckily, we still have her writing to make the world more magical than it otherwise would be. This exquisite passage from A Wizard of Earthsea, written (so she told me) on her kitchen table at night after she had put her kids to bed, doubles as a metaphor for the whole, glorious, transformative Wow of Art.

Nocturnes at Bookshop.org

“A Word on Statistics” at Poetry Foundation

“Adlestrop” at Poetry Foundation

The Country Child at Penguin UK

“A Slumber did my Spirit Seal” at Poetry Foundation

The Branch Will Not Break at Bookshop.org

A Wizard of Earthsea at Bookshop.org

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

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92Y's Read By - Read By: Luis Alberto Urrea
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05/19/20 • 13 min

Luis Alberto Urrea on his selection:

Annie Dillard’s books came to me in one of those writerly seasons of transition. I could dip into any of her first volumes and get lost. It’s the way she conflates what some people call “nature writing” with philosophical depths at play, with sudden bursts of homespun vernacular and finally what can only be a kind of theological verve. She is one of the masters who pushes me into a new way of seeing.

In "Living Like Weasels," Annie Dillard is telling us how savage and sacred our moments of life, how fleeting. She is reminding us to live all of our moments ferociously. I think that is the perfect message for all of us right now.

Teaching a Stone to Talk at Bookshop.org

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

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92Y's Read By - Read By: Claudia Rankine
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05/23/20 • 4 min

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 worked between September and December of that year and then fell ill and died in March of 1938.

The Complete Posthumous Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia

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

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FAQ

How many episodes does 92Y's Read By have?

92Y's Read By currently has 83 episodes available.

What topics does 92Y's Read By cover?

The podcast is about Poetry, Fiction, Reading, Podcasts, Books and Arts.

What is the most popular episode on 92Y's Read By?

The episode title 'Read By: Caryl Phillips' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on 92Y's Read By?

The average episode length on 92Y's Read By is 13 minutes.

How often are episodes of 92Y's Read By released?

Episodes of 92Y's Read By are typically released every 7 days.

When was the first episode of 92Y's Read By?

The first episode of 92Y's Read By was released on Mar 24, 2020.

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