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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
