“Is there anything Egan can’t do?” asked The New York Times Book Review. In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan masters her first historical novel. Beginning during the middle of the Great Depression, Manhattan Beach follows the story…
There’s one major aspect of the popular Gold Rush lore that few Californians today know about: during that period, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000, much of the decline from state-sponsored slaughter. Addressing the aftermath of colonization and historical trauma…
Stephen Greenblatt—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of The Swerve and Will in the World—investigates the life of one of humankind’s greatest stories. His newest book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, explores the enduring narrative of humanity’s first parents. Tracking the…
In Danielle Allen’s elegiac family memoir, Cuz: On the Life and Times of Michael A., she tries to make sense of a young African American man’s tragic coming-of-age in Los Angeles. Allen, a Harvard professor and author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of…
With the likes of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Mexico has a long tradition of politically engaged public art, which has often depicted—with varying degrees of accuracy—the country’s indigenous population. Two gifted young artists from the collective Tlacolulokos have been commissioned to…
Two generations of African writers—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, an elder statesman from Kenya, and Richard Ali A Mutu, a young novelist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—discuss the politics of writing in African languages, the vibrancy of the continent’s cultural output, and exciting new trends in…
Ali Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum in Washington, D.C., an advocacy organization promoting the value of immigrants and immigration, sheds new light on our nation’s brewing immigration debate in his timely book, There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome…
Join us for an electrifying evening of poetry as four bold writers from diverse backgrounds come together on the stage to explore their common experiences of loss through time and history. Navigating losses of home, of life, and of identity—from a family displaced by war to an examination of videos…
An award-winning writer of short stories, children’s books, and literary novels, Maile Meloy’s new novel Do Not Become Alarmed is a masterfully executed emotional thriller about what happens when two American families go on a tropical vacation and the children go missing. New York Times bestselling…
Twenty years after her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, internationally celebrated author Arundhati Roy returns to fiction with a dazzling new novel. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness journeys across the Indian subcontinent—from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads…
From growing up as a devout woman from a modest family in Saudia Arabia to becoming an unexpected leader of a courageous movement to support women’s right to drive, Manal al-Sharif recounts her life’s journey in her ferociously intimate new memoir Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening. When…
Alan Alda, the award-winning actor and bestselling author, discusses his decades-long quest to understand the intricacies of communication. With his trademark humor and candor, Alda’s new book, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating…
