The journalist and 2017 National Book Award Winner delivered the Library's annual Robert B. Silvers Lecture. The talk is named in honor of the co-founding editor of the New York Review of Books, who died in March 2017. With unexpected candor and intimacy, Gessen traced her own life as a sequence of choices and explored how notions of choice affect ideas about immigration, identity, and purpose.
Neil Gaiman's reading from 2013 uses a rare prompt copy that belonged to Charles Dickens himself and now resides in The New York Public Library. Dickens marked it up and annotated it for the express purpose of performing the story in front of an audience, which he did regularly in the 1850s and 1860s.
Is self-interest the only force motivating business? Or can altruism be an equally powerful driver? It's a question that Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize–winning father of microcredit, answers in his latest book, A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions . He spoke with fellow economist Jeffrey Sachs.
The titan of American poetry was at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in November to talk about her latest collection, A Good Cry. She spoke with Joy-Ann Reid, the host of MSNBC's AM Joy.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning literary historian and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright discuss Greenblatt's latest book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve , "a life history of one of the most extraordinary stories ever told." Exploring the power of narrative to travel from myth into reality, Greenblatt and Kushner traced the tale from its biblical origins through its imaginings in the minds of writers and artists from St. Augustine to Albrecht Dürer to John Milton.
The Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Poetry Editor of The New Yorker speaks with Garnette Cadogan about his most recent work of nonfiction, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. Young traces the particularly American tradition of cons, hoaxes, and fakes, from P. T. Barnum to today.
The Soviet famine of the early 1930s killed around 5 million people; almost 4 million of them were Ukrainians. As Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum demonstrates in her latest book, Red Famine, it wasn't fate or chance that skewed those numbers so heavily—it was something much more deliberate, and much more sinister. And the story behind it was, until recently, in danger of disappearing. Applebaum spoke about recovering it at the New York Public Library...
Envisioning the archives of the future with the Chicago-based artist, who was joined by Nettrice Gaskins, director of the STEAM Lab at the Boston Arts Academy, and Greg Carr, a professor at Howard University.
Jones may be known as a liberal activist, but his new book, "Beyond the Messy Truth," is a call to action for all Americans seeking a way out of our ideological and cultural divisions. He spoke about it at the Library with CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin.
Ulysses S. Grant has for decades routinely listed as one of our worst presidents. Ron Chernow says the legacy of the Civil War hero and 18th president is deeply misunderstood, making the case in both his latest book and in this conversation with Richard Stengel, former managing editor of TIME magazine.
The co-editors of the essay collection Nasty Women along with select contributors to it explore the complications of being an American woman in 2017. Featuring Kate Harding and Samhita Mukhopadhyay, with Kera Bolonik, Zerlina Maxwell, and Meredith Talusan. Moderated by Jezebel founder Anna Holmes.
Twenty years in the making, Greater Gotham is Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Mike Wallace's follow-up to his 1999 Gotham. He spoke about the New York City history, which covers 1898 to 1918, with the New Yorker's Jelani Cobb.
The Booker Prize–winning novelist discusses his twelfth, and most recent, novel, The Golden House.
The National Book Award–winning author spoke at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture about her most recent novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing. She was joined by Lisa Lucas, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation.
Two writers, two beautiful books, both on the subject of death. Atul Gawande's Being Mortal examines the lengths modern medicine must go to better humanize the final stages of our lives. Elizabeth Alexander's The Light of the World is the memoir of her husband Ficre's sudden and unexpected death, and Alexander's process of grieving and rebuilding that followed it.
The host and co-creator of Studio 360 discusses his new book, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History. He spoke with NYU professor Kwame Anthony Appiah. Andersen argues that the roots of our post-truth, alternative facts present can be discovered in America's "promiscuous devotion to the untrue" and its instinct to believe in make believe, evident across four centuries of magical thinkers and true believers, hucksters and suckers, who have embedded an appetite for believe-whate...
The filmmaker speaks about his groundbreaking documentary I Am Not Your Negro at the Schomburg Center with the Schomburg's Director, Kevin Young and LIVE from the NYPl's Paul Holdengräber.
The Nigerian writer discusses her debut novel, Stay With Me, the haunting tale of a young couple whose childless marriage threatens to tear them apart. It was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and hailed by Michiko Kakutani as "powerfully magnetic and heartbreaking."
Kendi discussed his National Book Award–winning work on the history of racist ideas in America with Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Director Emeritus of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
MIT linguist, philosopher, and political theorist Noam Chomsky, in conversation with actor Wallace Shawn.
Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, and best-selling author Judy Collins came to the Library back in February, to celebrate the publication of her most recent book, Cravings. “As an active, working alcoholic with an eating disorder,” she writes, “I yearned for serenity and was tormented for much of my life by longings, addictions, and painful crises over food: bingeing, bulimia, weight loss and gain.” Collins spoke with William Kelly, who is NYPL’s Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Librar...
The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright was joined in May by members of the Broadway cast of Sweat to talk about the play and the issues behind it at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Best-selling novelist Min Jin Lee on her latest book, the ups and downs of her career, the history of Koreans in Japan, and the treatment of Asians in America.
Philip Glass is a giant of twentieth-century American music, arguably of the most influential composers of his time. He spoke with LIVE from the NYPL’s Paul Holdengräber last June about his memoir "Words Without Music." It is a riveting record of a life very well lived, and a fascinating conversation with a legendary artist.
Writer, activist, and podcast host Janet Mock joins for a discussion of her second memoir, Surpassing Certainty. She's interviewed by Lisa Lucas, the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. The two talked about everything from Mock’s time in the publishing industry to her work in a Honolulu strip club, from spam recipes and Zara dresses to the influence of writers like Maya Angelou and Zora Neale Hurston.
One of contemporary art's most towering figures guides us through his astonishing new exhibition at MASS MoCA.
In the 1920s, the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma become oil millionaires after black gold was discovered under their land. Discover the stories of the mysterious that followed and one of the FBI's earliest investigations.
Tracy K. Smith was named 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate last week. In 2016 she came by the Library to discuss her memoir, Ordinary Light.
This week, the second part of Jelani Cobb's lecture on politics, journalism, and history entitled "The Half-Life of Freedom: The Demagogues of American History."
New Yorker staff writer and Columbia Journalism School professor Jelani Cobb delivers a lecture on politics, journalism, and history entitled "The Half-Life of Freedom." This episode is part 1: "The Media and Alternative Facts."
