The author of the bestseller The History of Love offers a soaring novel about a stolen desk that contains the secrets, and becomes the obsession of the lives it passes through.
A land of palm trees and movie stars, sunshine and glamour, Los Angeles inhabits a place of the mind as much as it does a physical geographic space. Often imagined of as a kind of paradise, the actual reality of the city is far more complex. Join us for cartographic history of the City of Angels…
Danticat, the acclaimed Haitian-American novelist, tells the stories of artists who create despite, or because of, the horrors that drove them from their homelands and that continue to haunt them.
What is Latino literature? Who writes it? Who reads it? Explore a rich literary tradition of five centuries of writing from two continents and 10 countries, from letters to the Spanish crown, to U.S. urbanites who grow up speaking Spanglish. Join this national conversation about the contribution of…
One of the most gifted and best known Native American writers today offers this highly original self-portrait, steeped in Native American storytelling traditions, that weaves together family/personal memoir with an accounting of the creatures and landscapes that inform her vision of the world.
The New Yorker music critic leads an audio tour of several hundred years of music history, from Renaissance lute songs to Led Zeppelin, showing how certain motifs of celebration and lament recur in many different contexts and cultures.
O'Neill, a former barrister and PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of the novel Netherland has written a brilliant inquiry propelled by the unexplained incarcerations of both his grandfathers (one Irish, one Turkish) during the Second World War.
Set among the mid-forties denizens of Manhattan's SoHo-the new novel by the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Hours takes a deep look at the meaning of beauty and the place of love in our lives.
Appiah, a leading philosopher (\"America's Socrates\") and a professor at Princeton University, demonstrates that honor is the driving force in the struggle against man's inhumanity to man.
What causes a child to grow up gay or straight or bisexual? Neuroscientist LeVay summarizes where the quest for a biological explanation of sexual orientation stands today, taking us on a tour of laboratories that specialize in genetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology…
Join us for a mind-boggling multi-media tour through the early days of an institution whose alumni left their fingerprints all over popular culture: Animal House, Caddyshack, Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, SCTV, Spinal Tap, In Living Color, Ren & Stimpy, and The Simpsons. Long before there was…
More than half of the worlds' 1.3 billion Muslims live along the tenth parallel, as do roughly sixty percent of the world's 2 billion Christians. Griswold, award-winning poet and investigative journalist, traveled for seven years on the tenth parallel, examining the complex relationship of religion…
Join us for an illuminating journey through history, geopolitics, and religion to investigate whether Islam is indeed the cause of some of today's most important international crises and how we might move conversations beyond religious and ideological divides.
Hyde--MacArthur Fellow and author of the ground breaking study of art and commerce The Gift--offers a stirring defense of our cultural commons, that vast store of art and ideas we inherited from the past which continues to enrich the present.