92Y's Read By

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

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

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

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

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