From one of our finest literary interpreters of science and nature comes an optimistic manifesto on the earth-shaking changes now affecting every part of our lives, and those of our fellow creatures. Through her compelling and meditative prose, Ackerman reminds us how the human and natural worlds coexist, coadapt and interactively thrive.
Ellroy, one of America’s greatest living crime writers, draws on the history of Los Angeles in his newest novel, Perfidia. Together with Kirn, author of a recent riveting take on a Los Angeles cold case, Ellroy uncovers a corrupt city under the shadow of Pearl Harbor, where the investigation of a hellish murder of a Japanese family throws together and rips apart four driven souls.
Weaving history, journalism, and memoir, the author of The Accidental Asian and founder of Citizen University explores the parallel rise of China and the Chinese American—how Chinese immigrants have exceled despite racism and xenophobia, and how they reconcile competing beliefs about what constitutes success, virtue, and belonging in a time of deep flux. From Confucius to the Constitution, Liu discusses his new collection of personal essays that provide insight into the evolving Chinese American...
Has the Internet ruined everything or is it our savior? boyd, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, skewers misunderstandings and anxieties about the online lives of teens often voiced by teachers and parents in her eye-opening new book. Integrating a decade’s worth of interviews with teens, boyd injects nuances and complexity into the discussion of how they are trying to carve out a space of their own, as their lives are increasingly mediated through services like Facebook, Twitter and ...
In a follow-up to his masterful Say Her Name, The Interior Circuit is Goldman’s emergence from the grief of his wife’s death as he embraces Mexico’s capital as his home—a city which stands defiantly apart from so many of the social ills and violence wracking Mexico. Yet as the narco war rages on and with the restoration to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexico City’s special apartness seems threatened. In setting out to understand the menacing challenges the city now faces, Gold...
In their groundbreaking book Zoobiquity, cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and science writer Kathryn Bowers describe how they arrived at a pan-species approach to medicine. Animals do indeed get diseases ranging from brain tumors and heart attacks to anxiety and eating disorders, just like we do—and the authors explore how animal and human commonality can be used to diagnose, treat, and heal patients of all species. In her illuminating new book, Animal Madness, Laurel Braitman chronicles ...
“Dear ONE,” illuminates the lives of ordinary queer Americans as recounted through letters written between 1953 and 1967, to L.A.’s ONE Magazine, the first openly gay and lesbian periodical in the United States. Looking for love, friendship, advice or understanding, readers wrote of loneliness and longing, of joy and fulfillment, and of their daily lives, hidden from history. This dramatic reading is adapted and directed by Zsa Zsa Gershick from material from ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archi...
The work of British writer Geoff Dyer is frequently classified as “unclassifiable;” his writing is wildly eclectic yet gorgeously coherent. His new book, Another Great Day at Sea—about life on an American aircraft carrier—is at the same time a travelogue, unerring social observation, and honed comedy. Zona, his meditation on the film Stalker, by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, was supposed to be a book about tennis; his book about D.H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, is essentially about not wri...
For decades, celebrated fiction author Denis Johnson (Jesus’ Son and Tree of Smoke) has been writing some of the most adventurous plays in modern American theater, with a major trilogy focused on the Cassandra family, a clan so star-crossed that several members are incarcerated, institutionalized or in and out of rehab. The epistolary The Starlight on Idaho finds the youngest son, Cass, sobering up in a clinic housed in what was once a hot-sheet motel on Idaho Street, the Starlight. While he’s t...
New novels from Michelle Huneven (Off Course) and Mona Simpson (Casebook) both deal with love and its moral varieties, from quite different perspectives. As their characters variously struggle to forge lasting connections, they evoke issues long familiar to the psychoanalyst. Is it possible to separate out the strands of fantasy and projection, family patterning, and primal need from adult love? What makes highly intelligent, thoughtful people so thoroughly lose their way in love’s enchantment? ...
Edward St. Aubyn’s five-volume series of semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels is one of the most acclaimed fiction cycles in English literature. Michael Silverblatt talks with St. Aubyn about his first novel since completing his series hailed for its satirizing of the English aristocracy. In Lost for Words, St. Aubyn employs his lethal dose of humor in a send-up of England’s premier literary prize and its controversial, eco-disastrous sponsor. St. Aubyn’s acid pen skewers the competing a...
In 1939, Union Station opened on the former site of Los Angeles’s original Chinatown—displacing thousands of Chinese and Chinese Americans. The new station fulfilled the vision of civic leaders who believed that an impressive gateway was critical to the growth of Los Angeles. In place of Chinatown, a distinctive Mission Revival station proudly stands as the centerpiece of our regional transportation system. Yet balances of power and political economies were disrupted; financial and legal battles...
Form is an Extension of Content, wrote Charles Olson. What is a writer’s relationship to form? Three accomplished, innovative and genre-crossing writers explore the power and influence of structure, starting with the sentence, in revealing and shaping their material.
On the occasion of her new memoir, one of America’s most beloved and accomplished classical singers shares her life story: a descendant of generations of hardworking slaves and free ancestors who grew up amid the challenges of Jim Crow racism in the south as the civil rights movement was at its nascence. Nurtured by a close family and a tight-knit community centered on the local church, Jessye Norman grew up singing songs and spirituals within a tight-knit community. Decades later, after a meteo...
Whitehead, the bestselling author of Zone One and an amateur player, lucked into a seat at the biggest card game in town—the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. In this raucous social satire—equally exhilarating for those who’ve played cards their whole life or who have never picked up a hand—he chronicles the gritty subculture of high-stakes Texas Hold-em.
One of America’s most talented pianists (Musical America’s 2014 Instrumentalist of the Year), and thought-provoking writers on music, Jeremy Denk (2014 Ojai Music Festival Music Director) expounds upon the magic of music making—from learning how to practice and the daily rites of discovery, to the mastery of reasoning with your muscles and the sheer joy of no longer needing to think. Denk illuminates the paradox of seeking perfection while full knowing the possibilities are infinite.
The Poetry of America’s 2014 national series The Voice of Women in American Poetry celebrates an enormous literary heritage. Distinguished contemporary poets—both male and female—will gather in five cities around the country to pay tribute to the immense achievement of a wide range of poets, from Phyllis Wheatley and Anne Bradstreet to Adrienne Rich and Lucille Clifton. In Los Angeles, join poets Marilyn Chin on Ai, Toi Derricotte on Anne Sexton, and Percival Everett on Gertrude Stein.
What are the ideas, forms, questions, syntaxes, images, and narratives of our immediate future? Who better as our compass in the wilds of the now than emerging writers? Join students from five Southland graduate writing programs—CalArts, Otis College, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and USC—as they share recent writings and tune our ears to the future of language.
In the summer of 1998, Kirn—then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage—set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. In this true and chilling story of a writer being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley, Kirn invites us into the fun-house world of an eccent...
Join us in a celebration of Bark, a new collection of stories (the first in fifteen years, since Birds of America) by one of America’s most beloved and admired short-story writers. With her singular wisdom and in her inimitable voice—"fluid, cracked, mordant, colloquial" (The New York Times Book Review)—Moore plumbs the public and private absurdities of American life in a heartrending mash-up of the tragic and the hilarious.
How do you write/convey/film the story of a visionary figure with tragic flaws who founded a labor union, launched a movement, and inspired a generation? Biographer Miriam Pawel, playwright/director Luis Valdez (Teatro Campesino) lend their perspective on the crusades of an unlikely American hero who ignited one of the great social movements of our time.
From the MacArthur Award-winning writer comes a subtle and quietly devastating new novel about love, exile, and the fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and histories. All Our Names is a tale of friendship between two young men who come of age during an African revolution and the emotional and physical boundaries that tear them apart—one drawn into peril, the other into the safety of the American Midwest. In this political novel, Mengestu presents a portrait of love and grace, of self-...
In 2009, three American hikers (and UC Berkeley grads) hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan unknowingly crossed into Iran and were captured by a border patrol. Accused of espionage, they were incarcerated in Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison—Sarah, for fourteen months and Josh and Fattal, for two long years. This poignant memoir is their story, as told through a bold and innovative interweaving of the authors’ three voices that recounts the psychological torment of interrogation and the collective strength of ...
This National Book Award-winning account illuminates the erosion of the social compact—the collapse of farms, factories, public schools—that had kept the United States stable and middle class since the late 1970s. In The Great Unwinding, Packer probes the seething undercurrents of American life, offering an intimate look into the lives that have been transformed by the dissolution of our economic glue. From unchecked banks to the rise of Walton's Walmart, this retelling of American history throu...
Imagine that Plato came to life in the twenty-first century and embarked on a multicity speaking tour. How would he handle the host of a cable news program who denies there can be morality without religion? How would he mediate a debate between a Freudian psychoanalyst and a tiger mom on how to raise the perfect child? Philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein provide an original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden role in today’s debates on religion, morality, p...
In this revelatory study of Muslim youth movements that have emerged in cities around the world in the years since 9/11 and in the wake of the Arab Spring, Aidi illuminates the unexpected connections between urban marginality, music, and political mobilization. By examining both secular and religiously-fueled movements as a means of protest against the policies of the "War on Terror," he explains how certain kinds of music—particularly hip hop, but also jazz, Gnawa, Andalusian, Judeo-Arabic, Lat...
On February 21, 2012, five young women entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow wearing neon-colored dresses, tights, and balaclavas to perform a "punk prayer" beseeching the "Mother of God" to "get rid of Putin." What transformed a group of young women into artists with a shared vision, and what gave them the courage to express that vision and to deal with the subsequently devastating outcomes? Through the trial of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot, Russian-American journalist Masha...
Artist Jeff Koons and filmmaker/author/photographer John Waters discuss Koon’s innovative and ever-changing art-making practice, which ranges from sculpture to painting to digital media. Like Waters, Koons’s art comments on the notion of "good taste," as well as the decadence of capitalist culture, the innocence of childhood, and beauty’s eternal resonance. Waters will speak with Koons about the inspiration and ideas behind his iconic works, such as Michael Jackson and Bubbles, Balloon Dog (Blue...
Walter Mosley, one of America’s most admired crime novelists joins one of its newest stars—Attica Locke—for a conversation about noir, race and writing in and from Los Angeles. Presented in collaboration with the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, the evening kicks off Tales from Two Cities: Writing from California, a free two-day conference at the downtown Central Library spotlighting the writers who help define Los Angeles as a place with a language, culture, and aesthetic al...
Frenkel, one of the 21st century’s leading mathematicians, works on one of the biggest ideas to come out of mathematics in the last 50 years: the Langlands Program. In his lyrical autobiography, he reveals a side of math we’ve never seen, suffused with all the metaphysical beauty and elegance of a work of art. Known for his controversial erotic film about math, Frenkel believes a mathematical formula can carry a charge of love. Frenkel is joined by screenwriter and The X-Files creator Chris Cart...
