From the Poetry Center Archive: Michael Chabon’s 92Y Debut
Tonight, 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center opens its 74th season with readings by Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith, whose new novels Telegraph Avenueand NW have been the talk of the town this fall. The event is nearly sold out, but we have just released a last batch of premium seats.
For those of you who can’t wait for the festivities to start, here’s something to tide you over till evening: an audio recording of Michael Chabon reading from the story “S Angel” at his first 92Y appearance in 1994. The story was first published in The New Yorker magazine in October of 1990 and begins like this:
On the morning of his cousin’s wedding, Ira performed his toilet, as he always did, with patience, hope, and ruthless punctilio. He put on his Italian wool trousers, his silk shirt, his pink socks, to which he ascribed a certain sexual felicity, and a slightly worn but still serviceable Willi Smith sports jacket. He shaved the delta of skin between his eyebrows, and took a few extra minutes to clean out the inside of his car, a battered, faintly malodorous Japanese hatchback of no character whatever. Ira never went anywhere without expecting that when he arrived he would meet the woman with whom he had been destined to fall in love…
In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, we have begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. To purchase tickets to tonight’s Chabon/Smith reading, please click here. To look at the rest of the season’s line-up, please click here. And for access to other recordings on our Virtual Poetry Center, including Zadie Smith’s first 92Y appearance in 2006, please click here.
Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.
