Authors-for-Literacy Readings at the United Nations
All contributions taken in at the "Authors-for-Literacy" books-signings
benefit literacy projects of the 'UN Staff 1% for Development Fund
December, 2011

Reading and presentation of Oscar Hijuelos
Excerpt from The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
by Oscar Hijuelos
“…Even though the brothers already knew how to speak a polite if rudimentary English that they’d learned while working as busboys and waiters in the Havana chapter of the Explorers Club on old Neptuno Street (“Yes sir, no sir, please don’ call me Pancho, sir) the twisted, hard consonants of the English language never fell on their ears like music. At dinner, the table piled high with steaks and chops, platanos and yucca, Cesar would talk about walking on the street and hearing a constant ruido – a noise—the whirling, garbled English language, spoken in Jewish, Irish, German, Polish, Italian, Spanish accents, complicated and unmelodic to his ear. He had a thick accent, rolled his rrrrrrrr’s, said “jo-jo” instead of “yo-yo”, and “tink” not “think” –just like Ricky Ricardo—but got along well enough to charm the American women he met here and there, and to sit out on the fire escape in the good weather, strumming a guitar, crooning out in English “In the Still of the Night”. And he could walk down the street to the liquor store and say, “One Bacardi dark please…” And then, after a time, with bravado, saying to the proprietor, “How the hell are you, my friend?”..." (p. 2) |
Emmanuel Soyer, Head of UN Language Programme,
welcomes audience at Oscar Hijuelos reading |

Pulitzer-prize-winning author, Oscar Hijuelos, signing books
|
Author Oscar Hijuelos and Event team member Pat Duffy
|

Post-reading reception with Oscar Hijuelos with (from l to r): Jodi Nooyen, Alice Harrison,
Marlenys Villamar, Pat Duffy |

October, 2008
Paul Auster signing books |
Post-reading reception for Paul Auster:
Historic UNCA Club (l to r: Javier Zanon, Paul Auster,
Mary Regan,
Francoise Bouffault, Pat Duffy) |
Excerpt from Man in the Dark
by Paul Auster
“…The night is still young, and as I lie here in bed looking up into the darkness, a darkness so black that the ceiling is invisible, I begin to remember the story I started last night. That’s what I do when sleep refuses to come. I lie in bed and tell myself stories. They might not add up to much, but as long as I’m inside them, they prevent me from thinking about the things I would refer to forget. Concentration can be a problem, however, and more often than not my mind eventually drifts away from the story I’m telling to the things I don’t want to think about. There’s nothing to be done. I fail again and again, fail more than I succeed, but that doesn’t mean I don’t give my best effort.” (p. 2) |

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas and poet Cecilia Vicuna in UNCA Club, post-reading
Excerpt from Instan
by Cecilia Vicuna
“Being” is a compound of three forms: “to grow”, “to set in motion”
And “yes it may be so.”
To be not an estar, but a way of being.”
|

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas celebrates the Lithuanian language
|