UCLA student tickets go on sale Monday, September 25.

Zadie Smith is a prize-winning author of essays, short stories and the novels, White Teeth, On Beauty, The Autograph Man, NW and, her most recent, Swing Time. Michael Chabon is also a prize-winning author of essays, short stories and the novels The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, WonderBoys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’sUnion, Telegraph Avenue and, his most recent, Moonglow. Moonglow and Swing Time share remarkable similarities. Both explore influence of family, cultural heritage and politics in shaping identity and how personal obligations are (or are not) affected by public events. Both reflect the unlikely blend of emulation and resentment that molds children’s relationships with their elders.

Both are told in the first person by a narrator who strongly resembles the writer. And both narratives jump back and forth in time between the rather dull present and the richly colorful memories of childhood and adolescence. Central to the overall structure of each novel are questions of cultural identity and the conflicting forces that surround the privileged and the dispossessed.