In a revelatory testament of what it means to be black in America today, this timely new memoir solidifies Coates as one of today’s most important writers on the subject of race. Composed as letters to his teenage son, Coates bears witness to his own experiences as a young black man while moving…
Roberta Kaplan, the renowned litigator who recently won the defining United States v. Windsor case to defeat the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), takes us behind the scenes of this gripping legal journey in her new book, Then Comes Marriage. Award-winning activist and scholar Lillian Faderman’s…
Award-winning Egyptian American feminist writer and commentator Mona Eltahawy is no stranger to controversy. Through her articles in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and more, she has fought for the autonomy, security, and dignity of Muslim women, drawing widespread supporters and detractors…
What does it mean to devote yourself to helping others? Larissa MacFarquhar, a staff writer for The New Yorker, follows the joys and defeats of people living lives of extreme ethical commitment in her new book, Strangers Drowning. Jessica Jackley, co-founder of the revolutionary micro-lending site…
The award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia delivers an exhilarating new novel about the creative partnership of marriage, and the yoke joining love, art, and power. Framed in Greek mythology and told from the opposing perspectives of husband and…
Over the past three decades, the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of three previous memoirs, Mary Karr has elevated the art of the deeply personal genre to become one of the most influential memoirists working today. In her newest work, Karr pulls back the curtain on her craft. The rare…
In the wake of a historic summer of groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions, Justice Stephen Breyer returns to ALOUD to discuss the ever-evolving influences on America’s highest court. In his latest book, The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities, Justice Breyer considers the…
Returning to ALOUD after receiving the 2012 Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award for his distinguished commitment to libraries and literature, Rushdie shares his newest work of fiction. Inspired by the traditional "wonder tales" of the East and set in a strange near-future New York City, Two…
From Africa to the Americas, the south to the north, cities to suburbs, opera to jazz, gospel to be-bop, and "shadows to fire"—discover Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, Hughes’ response to the riots at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival. Emmy Award-winning composer Laura Karpman, originally…
Leslie Jamison’s critically acclaimed The Empathy Exams confronts our personal and cultural urgency to feel. In The Unspeakable, Los Angeles Times opinion columnist Meghan Daum defiantly pushes back against the false sentimentality and shrink-wrapped platitudes that surround so much of the…
The L.A. food scene is as trendy, tweeted, pop-upped, and profit-busting as it’s ever been, and yet more people are going hungry at a greater rate than perhaps any other moment in the city’s history. As the USDA has declared, Los Angeles is the nation’s “epicenter of hunger,” where the phrase “food…
"Love, Los Angeles" is a letter in progress—a series of notes, fragments, reflections and odes—written by two native daughters navigating the quickly-changing landscape of contemporary Los Angeles. Through photographs and texts, journalist and essayist Lynell George and writer Marisela Norte have…
With all of its American idioms, virtues, and contradictions, what is it about Walt Whitman’s epic verse "Song of Myself" that so deeply resonates across other cultures and languages? In 2013, Christopher Merrill, the director of the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa, launched…
Can a city’s history be told through restaurant menus? In a second installment of a special collaboration with the Library Foundation to rediscover the Los Angeles Public Library’s vast archive, USC professor Josh Kun uses the Library’s menu collection to explore the shaping of Los Angeles, from the…
