A veteran of twenty years of human rights research and activism and recent recipient of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Bennoune offers an eye-opening chronicle of peaceful resistance to extremism in her recent book. Scouring the globe for stories of heroic individuals—artists, doctors, lawyers, and educators— who challenge stereotypes of Islamist fundamentalism, Bennoune shares these vivid portraits that offer an uplifting look at our best hopes for ending fundamentalist oppression worldwide.
Apr 03, 2015•1 hr 22 min
In his first collection in nine years, McGuane confirms his status as a modern master of Big Sky country. With a comic genius that recalls Mark Twain, and his own beautiful way with words, McGuane, The Bushwacked Piano, Gallatin Canyon, Ninety-two in the Shade, offers a jubilant and thunderous new batch of stories about life’s complicated nature from the wilds of Montana. Join us for a reading and conversation with one of America’s most deeply admired storytellers.
Apr 01, 2015•1 hr 14 min
Coming together for the first time on stage, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson and bestselling nonfiction author Blaine Harden explore how their different paths of storytelling led them to similar truths about illusive North Korea. Join Johnson, author of the spellbinding novel The Orphan Master’s Son, and Harden, author of the new historical exposé The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and the Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way t...
Mar 24, 2015•1 hr 14 min
A year ago, Russia invaded Ukraine, destroying a peaceful order in Europe and placing its own regime at risk. We in the West have experienced this historical turning point through a haze of propaganda. According to Snyder, the Kremlin was perhaps wrong about the political weakness of Ukraine but likely right about some intellectual weaknesses of Americans and Europeans. When will the war end? This rare pairing of two essential thinkers on Eastern European politics offers a revelatory look at why...
Mar 11, 2015•1 hr 26 min
The multi-talented dancer, choreographer, and director Bill T. Jones presents a provocative collage of movement, music, and personal narrative from Story/Time, a recent dance work produced by his company and inspired by the legendary composer John Cage. This program coincides with the publication of a new book based on Jones’ brilliant hybrid work and meditations as an African American artist struggling to find a place in a white-dominated dance world. Jones and two extraordinary dancers from hi...
Mar 06, 2015•44 min
The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and consultant on the Academy Award-winning film 12 Years a Slave discusses his latest book, which unearths extraordinary findings from Columbia University’s archives to shed new light on the Underground Railroad. Join Foner in conversation with Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy for an illuminating look at the fraught history of American slavery and the courageous acts of individuals who defied the law in the fight for freedom decades before the Civil War...
Mar 05, 2015•1 hr 1 min
David Axelrod, the great strategist who masterminded President Barack Obama’s historic election campaigns, sits down with Emmy Award-winning NPR host Michel Martin to discuss his years as a young journalist, political consultant, and ultimately senior adviser to the president. From a young journalist in 1970s and 80s Chicago—where he reported on the dissolution of the last of the big city political machines—to his twenty-year friendship with Obama, to serving during two wars and an economic disa...
Feb 18, 2015•1 hr 24 min
The work of Wendy L. Freedman, one of the world’s most influential astronomers, is based on being an observer, while that of Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll is based on his role as theorist. In a phenomenal period of discovery in which the view of the universe has expanded enormously, what fundamental discoveries might yet be uncovered? Join us for a conversation with these two experts about what could literally be on the horizon.
Feb 13, 2015•1 hr 11 min
Internationally recognized authority on comics and visual communication, Scott McCloud wrote the book on how comics work, Understanding Comics. Now he vaults into fiction with a breathtaking, funny, and unforgettable new work. In The Sculptor, McCloud delivers a spellbinding adult urban fable about a wish, a deal with death, the price of art, and the value of life. Join KCRW’s Elvis Mitchell for a conversation with McCloud on his long-awaited magnum opus and the power of storytelling.
Feb 11, 2015•1 hr 7 min
Ghettoside tells the kaleidoscopic story of one American murder—one young black man slaying another—and a driven crew of detectives whose creed is to pursue justice for forgotten victims at all costs. This fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime in South Los Angeles provides a new lens into the great subject of why murder happens in America—and how the plague of killings might yet be stopped. KCRW’s Warren Olney sits down with award-winning reporter Leovy to discuss this master work of liter...
Feb 06, 2015•1 hr 11 min
Though never charged with a crime, Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been imprisoned at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp since 2002. His deeply personal diary—an unprecedented publishing event as the first ever book published by a still-imprisoned detainee—is a terrifying (and darkly humorous) chronicle of a vivid miscarriage of justice. To discuss the book and the case, longtime human rights activist and editor of Slahi’s book, Larry Siems, joins Slahi’s lawyer, Nancy Hollander, whose practice is devot...
Jan 29, 2015•1 hr 23 min
Oswalt—comedian, actor, social media genius—illuminates the story of his early days of the comedy scene in Los Angeles and his unshakeable addiction to the New Beverly Cinema. From Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the bestselling author of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland chronicles his coming of age from fledgling stand-up at the Largo to self-assured sitcom actor. Oswalt’s witty prose proves that funny is just as fit for the page as it is the stage.
Jan 24, 2015•1 hr 28 min
In the waning days of the Obama era, artists and young people are shaping our discussion about race through activism, social media, film, and art. Author Jeff Chang’s newest book Who We Be: The Colorization of America remixes comic strips and contemporary art, campus protests, and corporate marketing campaigns for a fresh look at America’s racial divide. Director Justin Simien's Dear White People film taps into the unease of "post-racial" hype among college students of color. Join Chang and Simi...
Jan 22, 2015•1 hr 15 min
Lee, a deeply influential writer about race, class, and immigrant life in America sets his gripping and fiercely imagined new novel in a chilling dystopia, where abandoned post-industrial cities have been converted into forced labor colonies populated with immigrant workers. The fate of the world may lay in the hands of one nervy girl named Fan, a beautiful fish tank diver, who jolts the labor colony by running away. Join Lee and the story-bending author Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Scien...
Jan 16, 2015•1 hr 5 min
When artists and artisans can’t make a living, we all pay the price. Scott Timberg’s original and important new book, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, examines the roots of a creative crisis that has put booksellers, indie musicians, architects and graphic designers out of work and struggling to afford healthcare, stable housing and educational opportunities for their kids. This panel of creative thinkers and doers convenes to examine this urgent issue and explore what we can do...
Jan 14, 2015•1 hr 17 min
One of the most influential and celebrated musicians of our time, Carlos Santana, will sit down with L.A.'s own Cheech Marin to share the story of his life—from his humble childhood in Mexico to his emergence in the 1960s rock underground in San Francisco and the explosion of his musical career. In his new memoir The Universal Tone, Santana’s authentic voice and the unparalleled story is delivered with a level of passion and soul equal to the legendary charge of his guitar. From collaborations w...
Dec 02, 2014•1 hr 12 min
The comprehensive new Norton Anthology of World Religions, under the editorial direction of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack Miles, assembles primary texts from six major world religions in the religious equivalent of a giant "family album." Miles questions whether religion can be defined, and considers how, sometimes, the supposedly ancient turns out to be quite recent, and the truly ancient turns out to be surprisingly modern. Three religious traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—loom ...
Nov 21, 2014•1 hr 12 min
In her new book, Thornton, best-selling author of Seven Days in the Art World, uses a structure of richly linked, cinematic scenes that allow us access to understanding a dazzling range of artists—including Cindy Sherman, Gabriel Orozco, Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, and Christian Marclay, among many others. In this conversation with the Hammer’s Allison Agsten, Thornton discusses her research—how she rummaged through artists’ bank accounts, bedrooms, and studios and witnessed their crises and tr...
Nov 14, 20140
In her years of research, Lepore—Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer—has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston. Marston, who also invented the lie detector—lived a life of secrets, only to spill them onto the pages of Wonder Woman comics. Lepore discusses this riveting story about the most popular female superhero of all time, illustrating a crucial history of twentieth century femi...
Nov 13, 2014•1 hr 10 min
From Madame Bovary to Hedda Gabler, some of literature’s most passionate heroines find themselves under the fire of their times. In Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, the Irish novelist took on nothing less than the mother of Christ. In his masterful new novel, Nora Webster, he portrays a fiercely compelling young Irish widow and mother of four navigating grief and fear and struggling for hope. Rachel Kushner (The Flamethrowers) joins Tóibín for a discussion about creating characters that erupt off...
Nov 07, 2014•1 hr 9 min
One of our greatest American writers returns to the small Iowa town of Gilead—the setting of her earlier Pulitzer Prize-winning novel—in the unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder. Hear Robinson read and reflect on this masterpiece of prose, where the small town of Gilead becomes as quintessential to the rich fabric of American life as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.
Nov 06, 2014
When we ask young men and women to go to war, what are we asking of them? When their deployments end and they return—many of them changed forever—how do they recover some facsimile of normalcy? MacArthur award-winning author David Finkel discusses the struggling veterans chronicled in his deeply affecting book, Thank You for Your Service with Skip Rizzo, Director for Medical Virtual Reality at the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC—who has pioneered the use of virtual reality-based expos...
Oct 28, 2014•1 hr 25 min
Two powerful poets read from their work and discuss how poetry can become an active tool for rethinking race in America. Robin Coste Lewis reads from her upcoming poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus, which lyrically catalogs representations of the black figure in the fine arts, with Claudia Rankine—a poet whose incendiary new book, Citizen: An American Lyric—is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our often named "post-racial" society.
Oct 24, 2014•1 hr 10 min
Co-presented with the Consulate General of Poland.It’s been twenty-five years since the ultimate victory of the Solidarity movement in Poland, a revolution that ultimately led to the fall of communism. Adam Michnik, a Solidarity activist jailed by the Polish communist regime for his dissident activities, and now among Poland’s most prominent public figures, discusses the legacy of that revolution with Yasmine El Rashidi, a young intrepid Cairo-based journalist whose essays and articles on the (u...
Oct 22, 2014•1 hr 9 min
In this master work by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Héctor Tobar tells the miraculous and emotionally textured account of the thirty-three Chilean miners who were trapped beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking sixty-nine days. Join us to hear this astounding account of the personal histories that brought "Los 33" to the mine and the spiritual elements that surrounded their work in the deep down dark.
Oct 17, 2014•1 hr 9 min
In his thrilling new biography, Lahr—longtime New Yorker theater critic--gives intimate access to the life and mind of Williams- shedding new light on his warring family, his lobotomized sister, his sexuality, and his misreported death. In the sensational saga of Williams’ rise and fall, Lahr captures his tempestuous public persona and backstage life where Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan and others had scintillating walk-on parts. Maupin joins Lahr for a fascinating conversation about one of the most ...
Oct 08, 2014•1 hr 8 min
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are among the most adapted works of literature—why would two young, debut novelists take on the classics today? Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey offers a playful and fragmented remix of Odysseus’s long journey home. Told from the perspective of a minor player in the Trojan War, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles adds new dimension to the Greek heroes. Together at ALOUD for the first time, these young authors discuss the hubris and heart it takes to rewr...
Oct 03, 2014•1 hr 1 min
Two filmmakers share and discuss excerpts from their new documentaries that illuminate indigenous stories rarely seen on film. Bering: Balance and Resistance, by Lourdes Grobet—one of Mexico’s most renowned photographers—lyrically reflects on an Inuit community’s search for new values while struggling to reconcile the past. In Indian 101, filmmaker Julianna Brannum focuses on lessons taught by her great aunt LaDonna Harris, the Comanche activist who helped negotiate the return of sacred ground t...
Oct 01, 2014•58 min
New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow grew up in an out-of-time African-American Louisiana town where slavery’s legacy felt astonishingly close, reverberating in the elders’ stories and the near-constant wash of violence. Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward writes powerfully about the poverty of her Mississippi childhood and the pressures it brought on men and women, revealing disadvantages that bred a certain kind of tragedy. In this conversation, two accomplished storytellers take the stage to...
Sep 26, 2014•1 hr 11 min
For forty years, Heyday Books has been publishing California's stories—stories no one else has told—from native peoples and newly arrived immigrants, stories about the delicate Calliope hummingbirds and 14,000 foot peaks, to the explorations of California's most original thinkers, poets, and visual artists. Bancroft's new book describes an organization run on passion and devoted to beauty. Malcolm's friend and colleague, Vincent Medina, a member of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco A...
Sep 18, 2014•1 hr 13 min
