James Kaplan will read from his acclaimed novel, Two Guys from Verona: A Novel of Suburbia, which he describes as "a dark, sexy, wrenching comedy about Boomers Like Us facing both middle age and a new millennium. (It) takes place in a fictionalized Verona, NJ...but it's also about suburbia everywhere: Why, in this absurdly comfortable and fortunate era, people feel so lost and alone." The plot borrows from Shakespeare as two best friends from Verona - one a successful salesman and family man, the other a Sub Shop worker - trade circumstances. In the process a painful mystery from their adolescent days is solved. Two Guys was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and the Baltimore Sun said of it: "Kaplan's novel is a view of suburban life as David Lynch might imagine it: as banal as a mini-mall, yet seething with anxiety, eroticism and violence. Novels don't come any hipper than that."

Mr. Kaplan is himself a resident of nearby Hastings-on-Hudson with his wife and three sons. He sold his first short story to The New Yorker at age twenty-three and was included in the Best Short Stories of 1978. He has continued to write fiction, screenplays, and articles, essays, and reviews for over two decades. He is a contributing editor for New York magazine and TV Guide and a contributing writer for Premiere. He is also the author of the novel, Pearl's Progress (1989), and the non-fiction work, The Airport: Planes, People Triumphs, and Disasters at John F. Kennedy International (1994). He is currently writing a third novel, which he says is very different in geography and time from Two Guys, and he will ghostwrite an autobiography of John MacEnroe.

Just before she died, revered poet Amy Clampitt singled out Karen Chase "for a poetic vision of such earthy directness, on the one hand, and on the other of such visionary power," adding that Ms. Chase's "gift for turning a phrase, her ear for the throaty music to be found in the lower registers of English speech, are uniquely hers, to be listened for with pleasure." Now that Ms. Chase's first book of poems is out - Kazimierz Square, published last fall - her work is reaching the wider audience it deserves. She recently learned that it was a finalist for The Best Indie Books in 2000, is named one of nine finalists by ForeWord Magazine, and has received a Pushcart Prize Nomination.

Of course her work was not unknown. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, such as The Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Yale Review, as well as in The Norton Introduction to Poetry and The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology edited by Yusef Komunyakaa, and Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader, 1988-98, Vol. I edited by Andrei Codrescu. She has also been a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellow and she has received grants from The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and the Rockefeller Foundation. For fifteen years Ms. Chase was the writer-in-residence at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, teaching poetry writing to severely disturbed psychiatric patients and doing research. She founded and runs the Camel River Writing Center in western Massachusetts and has served on the resident faculty of The Robert Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire.

Suggested Donation: $5 ($3 for members)

This series made possible in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Westchester Arts Council with funds from Westchester County Government, corporations and individuals and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency. Additional funding has been provided by The Bydale Foundation.

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