The Big Read on XM Satellite Radio
Over the past two years, Buffalo has been one of over a hundred communities nationwide to participate in The Big Read initiative sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Just Buffalo Literary Center has been the NEA's local partner in the project, engaging the community each year at various locations throughout the city in a month long series of readings, seminars, panel discussions, and film screenings focusing on a single classic American novel and its significance to our culture.
In May of 2006, the book was Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. This past May, it was Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Communities around the country had the option of choosing from these two books, Wilma Cather's My Antonia, or Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter for their Big Read projects.
If you happened to miss The Big Read in Buffalo, or just want to enjoy these books and discussion about them in an audio format, beginning on September 10th, XM Satellite Radio in conjunction with the NEA and the online audio bookstore Audible.com will present The Big Read as a weekday radio program.
According to the XM Radio website, the show will begin with a serial reading and discussion of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, followed by Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Cather's My Antonia, and close with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Among the voices that will be heard as readers or commentators on the programs are actors Robert Duvall, Cheech Marin, and Mary Louise Parker along with retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
For more information about The Big Read on XM Satellite Radio visit the network's Sonic Theater website. For more information about the NEA's The Big Read initiative (which currently features a dozen classic American novels) visit www.neabigread.org.
--R.D. Pohl
