Don DeLillo's classic baseball story Pafko at the Wall is now a new audiobook to be released by Simon & Schuster Audio on March 30, 2021.
The audiobook features a live recording of DeLillo's story performed by award-winning actors
Billy Crudup,
Zachary Levi and
Tony Shalhoub on the
92nd Street Y's stage in 2019. A never-before-seen video of the live reading will be available for viewing on March 28-30 at
www.92y.org/pafko .
DeLillo's story reimagines an iconic moment in the sport's history: Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round the World," the famous home run that sailed over the head of Brooklyn Dodgers outfielder Andy Pafko to clinch the pennant for the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds in October 3, 1951.
DeLillo attended the 92Y reading, which took place on October 3, 2019, the anniversary of Thomson's "Shot." He told The New Yorker's
David Remnick in a 1997 interview: "All I wanted to do was write a fictional account of this ballgame. Pafko is written with a sort of super-omniscience. There are sentences that may begin in one part of the ballpark and end in another. They travel from one person's mind to another. I did it largely because it was pleasurable. It was baseball itself that provided a kind of freedom."
A transcendent account of one of the iconic events of the twentieth century-and a masterpiece of American sportswriting-Pafko opens with a Harlem kid sneaking into the bleachers and reassembles in fiction the larger-than-life characters gathered at the Polo Grounds that day: Jackie Robinson and
Willie Mays down on the field;
Frank Sinatra, Toots Shor and
Jackie Gleason with J. Edgar Hoover in box seats; and announcer Russ Hodges calling the action in the broadcast booth. Originally published in Harper's magazine in October 1992, Pafko was published as the opening of Underworld (Scribner) in 1997, then Scribner released the story as a stand-alone novella in 2001.
"From its opening line-'he speaks in your voice, American'-Pafko at the Wall is talking to the reader," says 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center Director
Bernard Schwartz. "What does it sound like? Play the music of DeLillo's sentences on the stage in your head, then hear how the pros do it. Have you ever heard actors having more fun? Thanks to Simon & Schuster Audio, now you can. The game lives on."
"The combination of
Don DeLillo's prose and the stellar performances from all three actors creates a magical listening experience," says Chris Lynch President & Publisher, Simon & Schuster Audio. "We're thrilled to work with the
92nd Street Y to bring this recording to a global audience."
Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including White Noise, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man, and Zero K . He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/
Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the
William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2013, DeLillo was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the National Book Foundation awarded DeLillo its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Billy Crudup won a Tony Award for his performance in
Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia. His recent stage and screen credits include Harry Clarke, Where'd You Go, Bernadette, and The Morning Show.
Zachary Levi starred as the title character in the TV series Chuck and the film Shazam!
Tony Shalhoub won a Tony Award for his performance in A Band's Visit. He won three Emmy Awards for his role as the title character in Monk and won a 2019 Emmy for his role in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
