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630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States

September 2016

Tracktown: On the Run with Alexi Pappas

September 8, 2016 • 7:15 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Free

Fresh off this summer’s Olympics in Rio, “renaissance runner” Alexi Pappas takes a break with ALOUD to discuss her far-reaching talents and interests. Beyond representing Greece’s Olympic team in the 10,000 meters race, Pappas writes poetry, essays, and makes and stars in films, including a semi-autobiographical movie, Tracktown, which recently premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival. A celebrity in the Twitter-sphere—even her signature top bun has its own Twitter account—Pappas will team up with fellow tweeter extraordinaire Sharon Ann…

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SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

September 20, 2016 • 7:15 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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In SPQR, an instant classic from one of our foremost classicists, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome while challenging the comfortable historical perspective that has existed for centuries. With precision and flair, the National Book Critics Circle finalist guides us through ancient brothels, bars, and back alleys to sift fact from fiction, myth and propaganda from historical record. Hear from Beard as she unpacks the unprecedented rise of a civilization that– even two thousand years later–still shapes many of…

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The Year of Voting Dangerously with Maureen Dowd

September 22, 2016 • 7:15 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Before you cast your ballot this November, join ALOUD for an evening of political takes and takedowns with New York Times Pulitzer-winning columnist Maureen Dowd. The bestselling author has covered Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton since the ‘90s and now in her new book, The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics, she plunges into one of the most bizarre and divisive campaigns in modern history. With her trademark cocktail of wry humor and acerbic analysis, Dowd traces…

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The Body In Question: Two Poets

September 27, 2016 • 7:15 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Following the Pulitzer prize-winning collection Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds’ newest book of poems, Odes, addresses and embodies love, gender, and sexual politics through the powerful and tender age-old poetic form of the ode. National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis’ stunning poetry debut, Voyage of the Sable Venus, considers the roles of desire and race in the construction of the self through lyrical meditations on the black female figure. Join us as these poets read from their intimate work and…

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The Arab of the Future 2: A Graphic Memoir

September 29, 2016 • 7:15 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Best-selling cartoonist and filmmaker and a former contributor to the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, Riad Sattouf shares from his highly anticipated continuation of The Arab of the Future—a recollection of his childhood as his family shuttled back and forth between France and the Middle East. Sattouf’s latest graphic memoir travels to his father’s hometown of Homs, where the young Sattouf attends schools and attempts to dedicate himself to becoming a true Syrian in the country of a dictator. Hear from…

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October 2016

Time Travel: A History

October 4, 2016 • 7:15 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Leading chronicler of science and technology and best-selling author of The Information and Chaos, James Gleick visits ALOUD with a mind-bending exploration of time travel through literature and science. His latest book, Time Travel, tracks our cultural, philosophical, technological, and evolutionary understanding of time—from H.G. Wells to Doctor Who, from the electric telegraph to the steam railroad. Novelist Charles Yu, a masterful storyteller who turns time inside out in his fiction, joins Gleick in conversation to delve into the looping…

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The Black Panthers: Portraits From An Unfinished Revolution

October 13, 2016 • 7:15 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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“What happens to revolutionaries in America?” This was the question photojournalist Bryan Shih sought to answer through his lens and the first-person narratives gathered in this powerful new book, Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution, released on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party’s founding. These intimate and rarely heard stories of rank and file party members whose on-the-ground activism—from voter registrars, medical clinicians, and community teachers—contribute missing pieces to a skewed historical record and offer lessons…

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The Wonder with Emma Donoghue

October 19, 2016 • 7:30 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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With all the propulsive tension that made Room an international bestseller, Emma Donoghue’s new masterpiece, The Wonder, is a tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives. Set in Ireland in the 1850s, an English nurse arrives in a small village to keep watch over a young girl who has been fasting for months and claims to be living only on manna from heaven. Is it a miracle or fraud or something else? Donoghue shares with ALOUD audiences her…

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The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land In Between

October 24, 2016 • 7:15 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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When Hisham Matar was a university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime’s most prominent critics in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Matar, the author of In the Country of Men, a Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, chronicles his journey home to his native Libya after the fall of Qaddafi in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance. Matar shares from The Return, his…

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November 2016

The Terranauts with T.C. Boyle

November 1, 2016 • 7:15 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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One of today’s greatest American novelists, bestselling author T.C. Boyle visits ALOUD to take audiences deep inside his electrifying, eco-visionary new novel. An epic story of science, society, sex, and survival, The Terranauts follows the high-pressured lives of eight scientists—four men and four women—closely monitored under glass in E2, a prototype of a possible off-earth colony. With characteristic humor and sharp wit, Boyle plays out his real-life environmental concerns as he experiments with the future of humanity.

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Stories from the City with Rebecca Solnit

November 10, 2016 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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What makes a place? The stories of a city are inexhaustible and contradictory as cities themselves are in constant conflict between memory and erasure. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit’s latest work in a trilogy of atlases (New York, New Orleans, San Francisco) portrays the myriad ways we coexist and move through a city depending on our race, gender, age and so much more. In conversation with architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, Solnit expands our ideas of how cities are imagined…

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The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

November 14, 2016 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials, and other efforts to harvest our attention. In his new book, The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch who coined the phrase “net neutrality,” explores the rise of firms whose business models are the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers. Wu visits ALOUD for a revelatory look at the cognitive, social, and…

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Moonglow with Michael Chabon

November 30, 2016 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared stories the younger man had never heard before. From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany and the heyday of the space program, Moonglow collapses an era into a single…

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December 2016

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS

December 1, 2016 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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In his new book, How to Survive a Plague, David France– the creator of the Oscar-nominated seminal documentary of the same name– offers a definitive history of the battle to halt the AIDS epidemic. Joined by Dr. Mark H. Katz, a physician activist on the frontlines of the affected HIV community of Southern California, and Tony Valenzuela, a longtime community activist and writer whose work has focused on LGBT civil rights, sexual liberation, and gay men’s health, France shares powerful,…

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Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

December 7, 2016 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Leading philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith dons a wet suit and journeys into the depths of consciousness in his latest book Other Minds. Combining science and philosophy with first-hand accounts of the remarkable intelligence of the octopus, Godfrey-Smith explores how primitive organisms bobbing in the ocean began sending signals to each other and how these early forms of communication gave rise to the advanced nervous systems that permit cephalopods to change colors and human beings to speak. Follow along as…

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School of Prince

December 9, 2016 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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TISA BRYANT, LYNNÉE DENISE, ERNEST HARDY AND GREG TATE PERFORMANCE AND CONVERSATION Writers, musicians, and cultural critics gather to pay tribute and explore the forty-year career of Prince. Drawing on original work, music clips and the emerging field of Prince Studies, cultural workers will consider the impact of Prince on literary culture and beyond.

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January 2017

Magical Mess: Reflections on Objects and Memories, Barry Yourgrau and Aimee Bender

January 12, 2017 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Writer-performer Barry Yourgrau is a clutterbug—perhaps even a hoarder? In his hilarious and poignant memoir Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act, he unpacks the psychology and culture of hoarding, clutter, and collecting, presenting a compelling look at a mysterious compulsion. Confronted by his exasperated girlfriend, Yourgrau embarked on a wide-ranging project to clean up his chaotic New York apartment and life. Known for his books of magical absurd stories, including Wearing Dad’s Head, Haunted Traveller,…

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Hiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror. In coversation with Alexa Koenig, Victor Peskin and Eric Stover

January 17, 2017 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Based on years of research and in-depth interviews with prosecutors, investigators, and diplomats—authors Alexa Koenig, Victor Peskin and Eric Stover examine the global effort to capture the world’s most wanted fugitives in their seminal book, Hiding in Plain Sight. The authors trace the evolution of international justice and how to hold accountable mass murderers like Adolf Eichmann, Saddam Hussein, Ratko Mladic, Joseph Kony, and Osama bin Laden.  The authors will also discuss the United States’ increasing reliance on military force…

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Shakespeare Now: Race, Justice and the American Dream

January 19, 2017 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Peter Sellars, the renowned avant-garde theater director, and Ayanna Thompson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar, will discuss the ways Shakespeare remains relevant in our contemporary American world. From expressions of black rage to the challenges facing systems of justice, they hope to illustrate how Shakespeare’s plays provide rich texts through which the most pressing problems in our world can be debated and solutions become, perhaps, imaginable. *Presented as part of The Library Foundation’s new exhibition, “America’s Shakespeare: The Bard Goes West.“

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From Nothing to Something: A Path Out of Poverty

January 24, 2017 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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In what author C. Nicole Mason calls an “insider’s story, ” Born Bright follows the journey of her own childhood in Los Angeles—an improbable path from episodic homelessness, hunger, and living in poverty—to becoming a leading voice on public policies impacting women and communities of color and low-income families. With grace, insight, and first-hand experience, Mason sheds light on the systematic structures that render an escape from poverty nearly impossible.  Joined by Ms. Magazine’s Education Director and Editor Karon Jolna, they…

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Evolution and the Young Mind: Creativity and Learning

January 26, 2017 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Young children often seem especially creative and imaginative. But can we prove that scientifically? And what is it about children’s minds and brains that makes them so imaginative? Alison Gopnik, pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher and author of the new book, The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children, discusses her cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn and how thinking like a child can make adults…

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Coyote America

January 30, 2017 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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With a brilliant blend of environmental and natural history, Dan Flores’ Coyote America traces the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the “wolf” in our backyards. The journey of the coyote to the American West and beyond isn’t just the story of an animal’s survival—it is one of the great epics of our time. Illuminating this legendary creature, Flores will be joined on stage for a conversation with playwright and chronicler of urban wildlife Melissa Cooper, who…

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February 2017

3 Writers on Fear and Loathing

February 2, 2017 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Writers and artists routinely reckon with anxiety and loathing as part of their creative process. Author and comedian Sara Benincasa, writer and illustrator MariNaomi, and novelist Shanthi Sekaran, in conversation with writer and literary organizer Michelle Tea, discuss with humor and honesty the role fear has played in their work and their creative process. Be part of a larger discussion of how we learn to manage the stress of daily life.

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Witness to the Revolution: Draft Resistance in 60’s Los Angeles

February 6, 2017 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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In her riveting oral history of the end of the 60s, Witness to the Revolution, Clara Bingham unveils anew that tumultuous time when America careened to the brink of a civil war at home, as it fought a long futile war abroad. For ALOUD, Bingham looks back at the local history of the non-violent draft resistance movement of men and women known as The Los Angeles Resistance. (The Los Angeles Resistance Collection is now being archived at the Los Angeles…

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Where Memory Leads: A Holocaust Scholar Looks Back

February 8, 2017 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and UCLA Professor Emeritus Saul Friedländer returns to memoir to recount a tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents. In Where Memory Leads: My Life, a sequel to Friedländer’s poignant first memoir, Where Memory Comes, published forty years ago and recently reissued with a new introduction from Claire Messud, he bridges the gap between the ordeals of his childhood during the German Occupation of France and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. Reflecting…

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The Sellout: A Novel

February 14, 2017 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Dickens, an “agrarian ghetto,” is the fictional Los Angeles hood at the center of Paul Beatty’s scathingly satirical novel, The Sellout. It’s a book that, as poet Kevin Young writes in his perceptive New York Times review, “isn’t for the fainthearted.” Beatty — the first American novelist to win the coveted Man Booker Award — is a comic genius at the top of his game and in The Sellout, he dares to question almost every received notion about American society. Buckle…

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Shakespeare in Today’s America

February 16, 2017 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Who gets to see Shakespeare and act in his plays?  Celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s extraordinary legacy, Lisa Wolpe and James Shapiro will explore the defining guidelines of performing his work today, and consider how and why Shakespeare still matters in contemporary America. Wolpe, actress, director, teacher, and producer, is the Artistic Director and founder of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, an award-winning all-female, multi-cultural theater company. James Shapiro, professor at  Columbia University , is the author of…

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This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

February 21, 2017 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Taking from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin’s new memoir This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression. In trying to sort out the root causes of her affliction, Merkin reflects on her childhood, her mother, her life as a writer, her marriage, and the birth of her child as she discusses in poignant detail various…

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Eccentric Embodiment: Tales and Truths with Valeria Luiselli and Guadalupe Nettel

February 23, 2017 • 7:15 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Co-presented with the Consulate General of Mexico in Los Angeles The eccentric fictional worlds of authors Valeria Luiselli and Guadalupe Nettel come alive on the ALOUD stage as these two leading voices in contemporary Mexican literature meet to share recent work. Luiselli, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and two-time recipient of the Los Angeles Times’ Book Prizes will share The Story of My Teeth, an imaginative odyssey through Mexico City’s art world and industrial…

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March 2017

The Constitution and the Presidency

March 2, 2017 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Erwin Chemerinsky In conversation with journalist Jim Newton The first weeks of the Trump presidency have raised numerous constitutional issues and a Supreme Court appointment.  What are these issues, and what others are likely to arise with Donald Trump as president? How are the courts likely to resolve them? Chemerinsky, the founding Dean and Professor of First Amendment Law at UC Irvine– and one of our leading constitutional scholars— addresses these questions with veteran journalist Jim Newton.   FREE/ RESERVATIONS…

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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

March 7, 2017 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Matthew Desmond In conversation with Steve Lopez, columnist, L.A. Times Harvard sociologist and MacArthur Prize awardee Matthew Desmond tells the story of eight families living on the edge in the New York Times bestselling Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Evictions used to be rare, but today, most poor renting families are spending more than half of their income on housing, and eviction has become ordinary, especially for single mothers. In vivid, intimate prose, Desmond’s landmark work of…

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Night Sky with Exit Wounds

March 13, 2017 • 7:30 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Ocean Vuong In conversation with author Viet Thanh Nguyen Award-winning poet Ocean Vuong’s debut full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, has been hailed by critics for its powerful emotional undertow, sincerity and candor, and “sense of the evanescence of all earthly things” as Michiko Kakutani writes in The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, and now a resident of New York City, Vuong’s poems navigate the overarching worlds of history, sexuality, and humanity with startling precision. Reflecting on…

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Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean

March 16, 2017 • 7:30 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Jonathan White In conversation with Philippe Cousteau Writer, sailor, and surfer Jonathan White journeys deep into the world’s oceans in his new book Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean. From investigating the growth of tidal power generation in Chile and Scotland to delving into the threat of rising sea levels in Panama and Venice, White discusses his book with Philippe Cousteau, filmmaker, explorer, and prominent environmental advocate carrying on the legacy of his grandfather Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Join us…

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The Idiot: A Novel

March 20, 2017 • 7:30 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Elif Batuman In conversation with author Steve Hely Elif Batuman, a New Yorker staff writer and author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, offers up a delightfully refreshing coming-of-age story about not just discovering but inventing oneself. Batuman’s debut novel The Idiot begins in 1995 when email is new and Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard where she navigates the strange new worlds of academics, friendships,…

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April 2017

Infidels: A Novel

April 12, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Abdellah Taïa In conversation with poet Steven Reigns Born in a public library in Morocco where his father was a janitor, Abdellah Taïa is an acclaimed novelist and filmmaker who lives in Paris, but sets his latest novel in his home country. With deep lyricism and erotic energy, Infidels follows the life of Jallal, a young gay Muslim who is the son of a prostitute witch doctor. The mother and son struggle as outsiders inside their Islamic world until Jallal…

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How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

April 13, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Rosa Brooks In conversation with Nicholas Goldberg, editorial page editor, L.A. Times War used to be a temporary state of affairs, but in today’s post 9/11-world America’s wars are everywhere and forever. Law professor and Foreign Policy columnist Rosa Brooks’ book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon, traces what happens when the ancient boundary between war and peace is erased. Part reportage and part memoir, this thought-provoking book is directly informed by Brooks’…

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Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River

April 18, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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David Owen In conversation with environmental writer Judith Lewis Mernit The Colorado River is a crucial resource for a large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. New Yorker staff writer David Owen, and author of more than a dozen books, delivers his latest work, Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River, and takes readers on an eye-opening adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways,…

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Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards

April 20, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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25th Anniversary Celebration and Reading by 2017 Awardees Hosted by Alice Quinn, Executive Director, Poetry Society of America 2017 marks the 25th anniversary of one of contemporary poetry’s most prestigious awards—Claremont Graduate University’s Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, given for poetry volumes published in the preceding year and created to both honor the poet and provide the resources that allow artists to continue working towards the pinnacle of their craft. In a celebration moderated by the Poetry Society of America’s Executive…

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May 2017

From L.A. to the Outback: Two Novelists

May 9, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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David Francis In conversation with author Jane Smiley David Francis’ latest novel Wedding Bush Road follows the visceral journey of a young L.A. lawyer called back to his family’s horse farm in rural Australia when his mother falls ill. Offering a uniquely intimate take on the timeless struggle between the past and present, town and country, Francis’ writing is fueled by a deep understanding of characters and landscapes that are worlds apart—he also works as a lawyer based in Los…

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In a Western Light: Poetry at the Edge of America

May 11, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Readings by poets Victoria Chang, Brendan Constantine, Kim Dower, Blas Falconer, Amy Gerstler, Doug Kearney and Brynn Saito Co-presented with Red Hen Press California poetry has looked to the future, as well as to its complex past and the present, as a way of understanding our place at the edge of the continent. California is about the magic of the land and the promise of possibility— yet the question remains, for whom? Seven contemporary California poets celebrate the diverse poetry…

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The Evolution of Beauty

May 16, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Richard O. Prum In conversation with evolutionary biologist Amy Parish Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays—from pheasants with 3D feathers to moonwalking manakins—traits that seem disconnected from selection for individual survival. Culminating 30 years of fieldwork, Richard Prum, the Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and a world-renowned ornithologist, revives Darwin’s long-neglected theory of sexual selection in which the act of…

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Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

May 18, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Janna Levin In conversation with theoretical physicist Sean Carroll Since 1916 when Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves—the powerful aftermath occurring when black holes collide—scientists have been trying to provide evidence of this profusion of energy. However, a telescope cannot record this event—the only evidence is the sound of spacetime ringing. Janna Levin, one of today’s most eminent theoretical astrophysicists and an award-winning writer, recounts the fascinating story of the surprises, disappointments, achievements, and risks of the scientists who…

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Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

May 25, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Robert Sapolsky In conversation with evolutionary biologist Amy Parish Why do we do the things we do? Author and MacArthur recipient Robert Sapolsky’s game-changing new book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst attempts to answer this very question, one of the deepest questions of the human species. Moving between neurobiological factors, to the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology, to tracing individual’s childhoods and their genetic makeup, to encompassing larger categories of culture, ecology, and…

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June 2017

When the FBI Investigates the White House

June 6, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Tim Weiner Lecture and Audience Q&A Ever since J. Edgar Hoover died, six weeks before the Watergate break-in, the FBI has had to confront presidents. FBI investigations led to President Nixon's resignation, indictments of President Reagan's national-security team, and the impeachment of President Clinton. Now the current administration faces a major counterintelligence case. When the FBI confronts the power of the presidency, America must navigate uncharted waters. Tim Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the…

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Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Accidental Activism

June 21, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Manal al-Sharif In conversation with Kelly McEvers, co-host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” 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 working in the male-dominated field of computer security engineering in her twenties, al-Sharif was labeled a slut for…

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July 2017

Missing Persons: Two Novelists

July 11, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Maile Meloy and Marisa Silver Reading and Conversation 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 author Marisa Silver’s latest novel, Little Nothing, follows an electrifying story of a girl, scorned for her physical deformity, whose passion and salvation lie in her…

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Resist, Disrupt, Transgress: Four Poets

July 25, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Chiwan Choi, Natalie Graham, Ashaki M. Jackson, and TK Lê Poetry Reading 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 capturing police killing civilians—these local poets will read from their uncompromising work that perseveres despite loss by searching…

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The Challenges of American Immigration

July 27, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Ali Noorani In conversation with Pilar Marrero Ali Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum in Washington, DC, 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 Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration. Although U.S. politics are more polarizing than ever, Noorani argues that our issues of immigration are more about culture and values than…

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Moving the Center: African Literature in African Languages

July 31, 2017 • 7:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Richard Ali A Mutu In conversation with David Shook Two generations of African writers—Ngugi 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 East, West, and Central African writing. Thiong’o and Mutu will be joined for a rare look at groundbreaking indigenous voices by…

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September 2017

Rebellion! Public Art and Political Dissent: Oaxaca and L.A.

September 19, 2017 • 7:30 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Chaz Bojórquez and artist collective Tlacolulokos In conversation with curator Amanda de la Garza   *Presented as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/ LA 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 create a new artwork in the Central Library’s Rotunda in juxtaposition to the…

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American Inferno: How My Cousin Became a South Central Statistic

September 26, 2017 • 7:30 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Danielle Allen In conversation with Franklin Leonard 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 Equality, became the “cousin-on-duty” when her younger cousin Michael was released from prison. Arrested at fifteen, tried as an adult—three years after his release,…

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October 2017

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: From Fiction to Faith

October 5, 2017 • 7:30 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Stephen Greenblatt In conversation with author Jack Miles   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 tale into the deep past, Greenblatt uncovers the tremendous theological, artistic, and cultural investment over centuries that made these fictional figures so profoundly resonant in the Jewish, Christian,…

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An American Genocide: California Indians, Colonization, and Cultural Revival

October 10, 2017 • 7:30 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Benjamin Madley and Greg Sarris In conversation   *Presented as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/ LA 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, two leading scholars explore the miraculous legacy of California Indians, including their extensive contributions to our culture today. Join us…

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Manhattan Beach: A Novel of WWII New York

October 19, 2017 • 7:30 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Jennifer Egan In conversation with author Marisa Silver “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 of Anna Kerrigan, a young girl who comes of age with a country at war. Inheriting the role of providing for her mother and sister after her father…

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Threat of Extinction: Language Activism and Preservation

October 21, 2017 • 3:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Bob Holman, Vincent Medina and Odilia Romero Hernández with linguist Leanne Hinton In conversation   *Presented as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/ LA   The essence of who we are is wrapped up in our language. What human knowledge is lost when a language goes extinct? Why should we care? Join ALOUD for a freewheeling conversation among language activists working to reclaim indigenous languages in California and Mexico. For the first time together on stage, this unique group of…

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Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York

October 24, 2017 • 7:30 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Roz Chast Artist talk and Q&A New York Times bestselling author Roz Chast returns to ALOUD with her hilarious new graphic memoir, Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York. Chast is a native Brooklynite and quintessential New Yorker whose street cred is regularly on display in The New Yorker, where she’s published over 1,000 cartoons. But when she moved to the suburbs, navigating life filled with trees instead of garbage was surreal— although her kids would grow-up thinking the…

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Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America

October 26, 2017 • 7:30 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Steven J. Ross In conversation with Rob Eshman No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world. There were Nazi plots to hang prominent Hollywood figures like Charlie Chaplin, gun down Jews in Boyle Heights, and plans to sabotage local military installations. As law enforcement agencies were busy monitoring the Reds instead of Nazis, an attorney named Leon Lewis and his ring of spies entered the picture.…

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November 2017

From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

November 1, 2017 • 7:30 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Caitlin Doughty In conversation with Carolyn Kellogg, LA Times book editor Caitlin Doughty, a mortician, best-selling author, blogger, YouTube personality, and director of the nonprofit funeral home, Undertaking LA, has long been fascinated by death, what it means to treat the dead with dignity, and why we are so afraid of dead bodies. Her new book, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, sets out on a global journey to discover how other cultures care…

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Technicians of the Sacred: Indigenous Poetry of the Americas

November 9, 2017 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, Jerome Rothenberg, Natalia Toledo Poetry Performance *Presented as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/ LA   Join Jerome Rothenberg and three major indigenous poets from the United States and Mexico—Natalie Diaz (Mojave), Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), and Natalia Toledo (Isthmus Zapotec)—as they share their work alongside a reading of selections from the 50th anniversary edition of Rothenberg’s global anthology of oral and written poetry, Technicians of the Sacred. Hailed by the LA Times Book…

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Oaxaca’s Third Gender: Man, Woman, Muxe

November 14, 2017 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Víctor Cata, Zackary Drucker, Maritza Sanchez Moderated by Bamby Salcedo, activist and founder of TransLatin@ Coalition *Presented as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/ LA   Anthropologists have traced the Meso-American acceptance of people of mixed gender back to pre-Columbian Mexico accounts of Aztec priests and Mayan gods who cross-dressed and were considered both male and female. In the shifting landscape of gender identity, what might we learn from the indigenous Zapotec people of Oaxaca’s isthmus region, who embrace a…

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The Revolution of Marina M.

November 16, 2017 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Janet Fitch In conversation with Boris Dralyuk, Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books L.A.’s own Janet Fitch, the mega-bestselling author of White Oleander and Paint It Black, returns to ALOUD with her newest work, a sweeping historical saga of the Russian Revolution. Beginning on New Year’s Eve in 1916 St. Petersburg, The Revolution of Marina M. follows the mesmerizing coming-of-age story of a young woman of privilege who aches to break free of the constraints of her…

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Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

November 29, 2017 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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James Forman, Jr. In conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History, UCLA   Why has our society become so punitive? In recent years, critics have assailed the rise of mass incarceration, emphasizing its disproportionate impact on people of color. However, many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers supported the war on crime that began in the 1970s. James Forman, Jr., a professor of law at Yale Law School and former D.C. public defender,…

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December 2017

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World

December 5, 2017 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt In conversation What lies at the heart of humanity’s ability―and drive―to create? New York Times bestselling author and neuroscientist David Eagleman teams up with internationally acclaimed composer and Associate Professor at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music Anthony Brandt in a wide-ranging exploration of human creativity. In their new book, The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, the pair studies hundreds of examples of human creativity from landing on the moon to paintings…

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An American Family: Being Muslim in the U.S. Military

December 7, 2017 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Khizr Khan In conversation with Jeffrey Fleishman, culture and film writer for the Los Angeles Times Last fall’s presidential election brought a range of impassioned voices to the national stage, but one of the most captivating speakers rose above petty politics with a deeply personal and very different view of what it means to be American. You may recall the Muslim parent Khizr Khan from the DNC when he spoke about his son, a U.S. Army Captain who was killed…

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January 2018

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

January 18, 2018 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Heather Ann Thompson In conversation with Kelly Lytle Hernandez, director, Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, UCLA Winner of a 2017 Pulitzer Prize, historian Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on the infamous 1971 Attica Prison riot as one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century. Chronicling the horrific conditions that led to 1,300 prisoners taking over the upstate New York correctional facility and how the state violently retook the prison—killing thirty-nine men and…

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Haiku in Zapotec: From Oaxaca to Japan and Back

January 23, 2018 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Jane Hirshfield and Víctor Terán In conversation with poet and translator David Shook *Presented as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/ LA Because of its similar celebration of the beauty of the natural world and focus on compactness, contemporary Zapotec-language poetry shares much in common with the Japanese haiku. Poet Víctor Terán—who’s performed his work from Oaxaca to London—will share some of his translations of the Japanese masters of the form alongside his own original Zapotec haiku, and American poet Jane Hirshfield will…

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Exiled from Cairo: Humor as Dissent

January 31, 2018 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Bassem Youssef In conversation with Kelly McEvers Bassem Youssef, a satirist who rose to international fame in the middle of the Egyptian Revolution with his incendiary brand of comedy and his knack for unabashedly mocking dictators, has been dubbed “the Jon Stewart of the Arabic world.” In his new book, Revolution for Dummies: Laughing Through the Arab Spring, Youssef chronicles his transformation from a heart surgeon who filmed YouTube skits in the laundry room of his home to the host…

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February 2018

The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

February 6, 2018 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Antonio Damasio In conversation with Manuel Castells, University Professor, USC What moved humans to create cultures—intelligent systems including the arts, morality, science, government, and technology? The answer to this question has typically been the human faculty of language, but preeminent neuroscientist, professor, and director of USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute Antonio Damasio argues that feelings―of pain and suffering or of anticipated pleasure―were the prime engines that stirred human intellect in the cultural direction. In his newest book The Strange Order…

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The Monk of Mokha

February 15, 2018 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Dave Eggers and Mokhtar Alkhanshali In conversation Acclaimed author Dave Eggers will be joined on the ALOUD stage by the fascinating subject of his newest book. The Monk of Mokha is the true story of Mokhtar Alkhanshali, an ambitious young Muslim man who was raised in the coffee-loving city of San Francisco and became fascinated by the rich history of coffee. When he travels to his ancestral home of Yemen with the hopes of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni…

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The Line Becomes A River: Dispatches from the Border

February 21, 2018 • 7:30 pm PST
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States
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Francisco Cantú In conversation with independent journalist Ruxandra Guidi For award-winning writer and former agent for the United States Border Patrol Francisco Cantú, the border is in his blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. His new book, The Line Becomes A River: Dispatches from the Border, is haunted by the stories he experienced both while working for the Border Patrol—where he hauled in the dead and…

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April 2019

LA Made: Suzanne Ciani

April 6, 2019 • 12:00 pm PDT
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States

The Central Library of the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) hosts modular synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani at its LA Made cultural series on Saturday, April 6th at 2:00 pm, with related programming beginning at 1:00 pm. Ciani's live quadraphonic performance caps this fourth (quad) year of the series, which features FREE (RSVP) music, dance, theater, and conversations with LA Made entertainers at libraries throughout Los Angeles. UPDATE: This program is sold out, but will be live-streamed on Los Angeles Public…

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