Internationally known novelist Don DeLillo, who rarely makes public appearances, will read from his work Sept. 26 at 7:30 p.m. in Cornell University's David L. Call Alumni Auditorium, Kennedy Hall, as part of the Epoch Festival, a series of readings in celebration of Epoch magazine's 50th anniversary.

DeLillo's new novel, Underworld, will be published by Scribner's on Sept. 22. DeLillo has won the National Book Award, the American Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His previous novels include White Noise, Libra and Mao II. His first published fiction appeared in Epoch 37 years ago.

Epoch, published by Cornell's Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, was chosen for the first-ever O. Henry Award for best magazine of 1997. This new award was given by Larry Dark, the editor of the annual anthology Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, in recognition of the excellence of the fiction published in Epoch's 1995-1996 volume. Four stories from Epoch were chosen for inclusion in the 1997 edition of Prize Stories, more than from any other magazine, and a fifth story was one of 50 to win an honorable mention. Dark read more than 2,500 stories from over 200 magazines to arrive at the final selection of 20.

Three of the four prize-winning authors will read Sept. 27 at 7:30 p.m., also in the David L. Call Alumni Auditorium: Robert Morgan, the Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell; Patricia Elam Ruff, a writer, commentator and lawyer from Washington, D.C.; and Arthur Bradford, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. This reading will be introduced by Dark.

The Epoch Festival will also feature a poetry reading by A.R. Ammons, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell and winner of the National Book Award; Kenneth McClane, the W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Literature at Cornell; C.S. Giscombe, a former editor of Epoch during the 1980s; and Phyllis Janowitz, professor of English at Cornell. All of the poets have published work in the pages of Epoch. The poetry reading begins Sept. 25 at 4:30 p.m. in the Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall.

Epoch, edited since 1989 by Cornell lecturer Michael Koch, has run continuously since its inception in 1947. It was founded by Professor Baxter Hathaway, who was brought to Cornell to establish the creative writing program. The magazine features the fiction, poetry and non-fiction of both nationally known and beginning writers. Epoch is distributed by Fine Print Books and sold in bookstores nationwide. A number of major libraries subscribe to the magazine.