Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette Michael Chabon and wife Ayelet Waldman, shown at the Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont in 2002, will appear at Monday's Drue Heinz Lectures program.

By Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman -- novelists, parents and America's best-known husband-and-wife writing team since Henry and Clare Boothe Luce -- are attracting a crowd for their appearance here Monday.

The Carnegie Music Hall is filling up fast, Sylvia Keller, director of the Drue Heinz Lectures, which sponsors the program, reported yesterday.

Keller wasn't sure if the pair will read passages from their various books. Instead, they'll interview each other, "literally pulling questions from a fishbowl."

And where will those questions come from, I asked?

"They will provide their questions," she answered.

Sounds kind of like George Burns and Gracie Allen.

Chabon does have his own writing to discuss, though. His new novel, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," will be published May 1. An advance copy arrived yesterday from HarperCollins.

The premise: Part of Alaska, not Israel, is the federally created home of Jewish refugees after World War II, but the territory is about to revert to the state, leaving the inhabitants fearful.

Crime goes on, regardless, giving detective Meyer Landsman plenty to worry about as well. Chabon's eponymous Web site has more details.

He's also contributing a serialized novel to The New York Times Sunday magazine, "Gentlemen of the Road," that started Sunday, and he continues working on screenplays.

Chabon is now turning his novel, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay," winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, into a film.

Waldman, author of several crime novels called "The Mommy Track" series and two stand-alone novels, is also a columnist on the Salon Web site.

For tickets, call the Heinz Lectures at 412-622-8866.

Gist Street

Bundle up for Friday's 8 p.m. reading at 305 Gist St., Uptown. The third-floor studio is on the drafty side, but if the Gist Street series attracts its usual crowd, there'll be lots of body heat.

The readers will be poet Ilya Kaminsky and fiction writer Kevin Moffett.

Kaminsky's 2004 collection, "Dancing in Odessa," won several prizes. He teaches at San Diego State University.

Moffett's work regularly appears in The Believer and McSweeney's, two publications in Dave Eggers' literary universe, and he is the author of the short-story collection, "Permanent Visitors."

Cost is $5 at the door. Bring your own beverage. Check www.giststreet.org for details.

Poetry elsewhere

Clarion University's Philip Terman reads from his work Feb. 7 at Point Park University's JVH Auditorium at 6 p.m. Terman is author of the collections, "The House of Sages" and "The Book of Unbroken Days." The reading is free.

Pitt-Greensburg

Pittsburgh City of Asylum poet Huang Xiang, in exile from his native China, will read at the University of Pittsburgh's Greensburg campus at 7 p.m. Feb. 12. The free reading will be in the Hempfield Room of Chambers Hall. For details, call 724-836-7741.

Pitt-Greensburg professor Jeffrey Sposato's book investigating Felix Mendelssohn's Jewish heritage, a finalist for a Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award, was just named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2006 by Choice magazine. "The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitic Tradition" (Oxford University Press) was one of 13 music titles singled out in the magazine's January 2007 issue. (Andrew Druckenbrod, Post-Gazette classical music critic)