Sunset Readings also partners with Constellation
By Alison Rooney
Like chamber music concerts for the literary-inclined, the Sunset Reading Series at The Chapel Restoration have inspired a devoted following. The announcement of upcoming authors is always highly anticipated. Happily, autumn brings a harvest of readings.
Susan Choi, who will read from her work starting at 4 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 4, is “a novelist I’ve admired since I read her third book, A Person of Interest,” says Ivy Meeropol, who co-founded the reading series with Bekah Tighe. “I quickly found her first two and devoured those, too.”
Susan Choi (photo by Adrian Kinloch)
Choi, who teaches at Yale, has written four novels. Her first, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, while her second, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize.
A Person of Interest was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and in 2010 Choi was named the first recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award given to a promising writer who has published three works of fiction. Choi’s most recent novel, My Education, was published in 2014.
In a review of My Education, which is set in the world of graduate student academia and involves intertwining passions, perhaps connecting the wrong people, Emily Cooke of The New York Times wrote that “Choi is a graceful, perceptive writer, and all of her novels are striking for the visual beauty of her descriptions.”
On Sat. Oct. 17, the Sunset Reading Series plans to host its “first reading on a boat,” Meeropol says, when Melissa McGill will read from a forthcoming companion book to her Bannerman Island installation Constellation. “We will read while we journey out to the island to watch the stars come out,” Meeropol says. “The photographers and designer of the book will be there, too.”
A number of writers who contributed to the book, which will be published by Princeton Architectural Press, will also be on hand to read, including Sam Anderson of The New York Times, poet and artist Edwin Torres, poet and New Directions editor Jeffrey Yang and Lenape Center co-founder and co-director Hadrien Coumans.
Artist rendering of Constellation (Evening). Image courtesy of the artist
Constellation, which rises nightly above Bannerman’s Castle, uses solar-powered LEDs atop 17 aluminum poles to simulate stars. These points reference features of the castle still standing, as well as echo pieces that no longer exist, connecting past and present: a new constellation. The installation, which has been up since June, has been a popular one, and will remain visible through the end of October.
Tickets to the cruise are $50 and include light fare from Beacon’s Homespun. It departs at 4 p.m. from the Beacon Institute Floating Dock. Visit artful.ly/constellation-events.
