William Burroughs was the original cult figure of the Beat Movement, author of Naked Lunch, and influence to scores of artists, writers, and musicians. For the centennial celebration of Burroughs’ birth, beat historian and biographer Barry Miles discusses the long-term cultural legacy of Burroughs and his literary risk-taking.
The Days of Anna Madrigal, the suspenseful, comic, and touching ninth (and final) novel in Armistead Maupin’s bestselling Tales of the City series, follows one of modern literature’s most unforgettable and enduring characters—Anna Madrigal, the legendary transgender landlady of 28 Barbary Lane. While some members of Anna’s family head for the other-worldly landscape of Burning Man, Anna embarks on a road trip that takes her deep into her past, including a visit to Winnemucca, Nevada where the 16...
This new work by the MacArthur Award-winning novelist begins when composer Peter Els opens the door to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab—where he experiments to find music in surprising patterns—has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Seeking help from family and a longtime collaborator, this "Bioterrorist Bach" hatches a plan to turn his disastrous collision with the security state into a work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around them...
Hailed as one of the most inspiring women of our time, musician and activist Angélique Kidjo shares the story of her world in the memoir, Spirit Rising: from the communist regime of her native Benin to her work as a UNICEF Ambassador and activist promoting education for all girls in Africa. Kidjo’s GRAMMY-Award winning music, rich with African rhythms, speaks to her own vibrancy, resilience, and to the hope she carries for the world’s spirit rising. Kidjo brings her electrifying presence to the ...
This first sweeping history of Parks' life challenges perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement. Theoharis offers a compelling portrait of the working class activist who stared poverty and discrimination squarely in the face and never stopped rebelling against them in both the segregated South and North. Ericka Huggins—former political prisoner, human rights activist, poet and teacher—who met Parks during her days of Black Panther activism—joins the discussion
A Tribute to Wanda Coleman with Terrance Hayes and Douglas Kearney. Music by David Ornette Cherry and featuring Stephen Kessler, Ron Koertge, Laurel Ann Bogen, Charles Harper Webb, Michael Datcher, Suzanne Lummis, Sesshu Foster, Jack and Adelle Foley, Brendan Constantine, Cecilia Woloch, Robin Coste Lewis, Austin Straus.
In a series of meditative essays, the award-winning writer Richard Rodriguez turns his perceptive gaze to the desert—in both the physical and spiritual sense—in a quest to understand his relationship to the "desert God" and to terrorists who kill in the name of that same God. He delves into what it means to be a gay, devout, Roman Catholic in his 60s—attempting to make sense of a world and a religion that have both rejected him at times. His peregrinations take him beyond the Middle East—to San ...
McDonnell’s Queens of Noise: The Real Story of The Runaways is a testimonial to the inspiration and insecurity of the trailblazer, a look at the Los Angeles music scene of the 70s and women on the run. Joined by Exene Cervenka of seminal L.A. punk band X and Riot Grrrl Allison Wolfe—veteran journalist McDonnell will lead a discussion on music making and selling, legacies, and the women who are breaking new ground.
World-renowned visual artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat’s provocative yet poetic work addresses issues of social repression among women, in her native Iran and beyond. Through haunting allegory and imagery, she portrays women as complex individuals with desires and ambitions, who move between intense private feelings and public life. Reaching beyond her own identity, Neshat also addresses broader concerns about cultural beliefs and the power of the erotic.
Robert Capa photographed her as a toddler; she chatted with Brando and Steinbeck in her living room. Academy Award-winning actress/director Anjelica Huston shares from A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York with Colm Tóibín, one of Ireland’s greatest living writers. Huston’s memoir illuminates the unconventional life of the daughter of director John Huston and prima ballerina Enrica Soma. She recounts her childhood, early romances, and the successful modeling career ...
In Connelly’s newest courtroom drama, lawyer Mickey Haller defends a murder case in which the murder victim was his very own former client, a prostitute he thought he’d rescued and put on the straight and narrow path. Haller is forced to find justice for both of his clients, living and dead. As he faces the "gods of guilt," he must struggle with personal demons for a shot at his own redemption. Connelly discusses the mysteries of crime writing with Miles Corwin, acclaimed author, and former crim...
As an activist lawyer and leading member of the African National Congress, Albie Sachs lost his right arm and the sight in one eye when his car was bombed by agents of South Africa’s security forces in 1988. After recuperating in London, he returned to South Africa and played a key role in drafting its democratic constitution. Nelson Mandela appointed him a judge in the new constitutional court, where Sachs made a number of landmark rulings, including recognizing gay marriage. Sachs, a man with ...
Roy Choi, border-crossing chef and co-founder of the Kogi BBQ taco truck, pays homage to the city that he loves in this memoir, a tale of his journey from childhood afternoons at his parents’ Korean restaurant, to pizza-fueled studying at the Culinary Institute of America, to becoming one of America’s most acclaimed chefs. Join us as Choi takes a break from the kitchen to talk about his new book, L.A. Son, a flavorful love letter to Los Angeles.
Hailed as the creator of war reportage comics, Joe Sacco uses darkly funny short-form comics to recount conflicts, including his latest book The Great War, an illustrated panorama of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Gene Luen Yang, the author of the acclaimed graphic novel American Born Chinese, brings clear-eyed storytelling and magical realism to tell parallel stories of two young people caught up on opposite sides of China’s violent Boxer Rebellion in his new work, Boxers and Saints....
What happens when formerly estranged peoples look at their entwined history together? After attending a Zen Peacemaker retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2000, Steinman embarked on a decade-long exploration—into her own family’s history in a small Polish town—as well as an immersion in the exhilarating and discomforting, sometimes surreal, yet ultimately healing process of Polish-Jewish reconciliation taking place in today’s democratic Poland.
In her new collection of selected stories, Taraghi—one of Iran’s best-known and most critically acclaimed authors—draws on her childhood experiences in Tehran, adult exile in Paris, and subsequent returns to post-revolution Tehran. Her stories are, as Azar Nafisi writes, “filled with passion, curiosity, empathy, as well as mischief—definitely mischief.” Listen in as Taraghi shares from The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons, made fully accessible to the English-speaking audience for the first time.
The National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, mines the eloquence of ordinary people facing extreme challenges in his new book. From families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, and schizophrenia, to children who are prodigies or transgender—Solomon illuminates the universal experiences of difference and the triumph of love.
Weisman offers a long-awaited follow-up to The World Without Us, his brilliant thought experiment that considered how the Earth could heal if relieved of humanity’s constant pressures. Now, after traveling to more than 20 countries to ask four questions that experts agreed were probably the most important on Earth—he explores the complexity of calculating how many humans this planet can hold without capsizing.
Seven years after the publication of the extraordinary novel After This, the National Book Award-winning author returns with Someone, a transformative novel about childhood, adolescence, motherhood, and old age, deftly stitched together by McDermott’s lyrical voice. McDermott takes the stage to discuss this masterful portrait of the 20th-century Irish-American family.
How was our understanding of whales transformed from grotesque monsters, useful only as wallowing kegs of fat, to playful friends of humanity and bellwethers of environmental devastation? Burnett, a historian of science and energetic polymath, offers a sweeping history of how science, politics, and simple human wonder have transformed our way of seeing these behemoths from below.
In Atwood’s dark and hilarious new novel, a man-made plague has swept the earth, but only a small group survives. In a world only Atwood could imagine, the Crakers’ reluctant prophet is hallucinating, and giant Pigeons and malevolent Painballers threaten to attack. Join us for a conversation with this visionary author on the stunning conclusion to her dystopian trilogy, set in a future that is not only possible but perhaps inevitable.
Over a multi-year collaboration, playwright and director Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, Melville scholar Wyn Kelley, and media expert Henry Jenkins have developed a new approach for teaching Moby-Dick in the age of YouTube and hip-hop. They will explore how "learning through remixing" can speak to contemporary youth, why Melville might be understood as the master mash-up artist of the 19th century, and what might have happened if Captain Ahab had been a 21st century gang leader.
Award-winning Los Angeles-based visual artist Alison Saar explores her own artistic practice and that of the Luba people of Central Africa with African art scholar and curator Polly Nooter Roberts. Using memory and the use of the female body as a mnemonic for social and political history, they explore race and gender through this conversation on artistic form.
Kennedy—a Harvard Law professor, former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and author of the New York Times best-seller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word—ponders the future of affirmative action and offers a definitive reckoning with one of the most explosively contentious and sharply divisive issues in American society.
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer A. Scott Berg clears away myths and misconceptions in this penetrating portrait of one of America’s most influential yet often misunderstood presidents. This deeply emotional study reflects the whole of Wilson’s life, accomplishments, and failings- from designing the ill-fated League of Nations, using his trailblazing ideas that paved the way for the New Deal, to his denouement as a politician whose partisan battles left him a broken man.
Los Angeles is a city of renowned private collections that have become public museums: The Getty, the Hammer, the Norton Simon, The Huntington, and soon, The Broad. Consisting of over 2,000 artworks by established and emerging international artists, The Broad will add significantly to the contemporary art holdings on view to the Southern California public. Inge Reist will lead a discussion with the Broads and The Broad museum director Joanne Heyler about how their aesthetic tastes and social and...
In MK Asante’s new memoir Buck, the award-winning writer, filmmaker, poet and professor scripts his rise from Philadelphia dealer and delinquent to the passionate and driven artist he is today. To share his powerful story of redemption, Asante sits down to rap with Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, on how he was transformed by the most unconventional teachers and the freedom to create on the blank page.
What might our city look like if the master plans of prominent architects had been brought to fruition? This panel—including architects, an architectural curator and the L.A. Times’ architecture critic—looks at those visionary works, which held great potential to re-form Los Angeles, yet were undermined by institutions and infrastructure. Can L.A.’s civic future be shaped from these unrealized lessons of the past?
In March of 1928, the St. Francis Dam north of Los Angeles—designed by William Mulholland as a reservoir for the California Aqueduct—collapsed. The largest engineering disaster in California history is inextricably woven into the epic history of water in Los Angeles. In this centennial year of the California Aqueduct, join us for a discussion of the St. Francis tragedy and its enduring catastrophic and cultural significance.
The recently published Songs in the Key of Los Angeles showcases the rich sheet music collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, and is the fruit of a collaboration between USC Professor Kun, his students and the Library Foundation. Join us for a night of rare L.A. musical history, in which the Los Angeles Public Library’s sheet music archive will come alive in story and song when Kun is joined by beloved, GRAMMY-winning Los Angeles band Quetzal.
