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…
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…
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…
You know Cheech as half of the comedy duo Cheech & Chong, and you know him for his memorable roles in Up in Smoke, Born in East L.A., Desperado, The Lion King, and Jane the Virgin, to name a few. But did you know that Cheech—which is not his real name—is also the owner of the most renowned…
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…
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, join us for…
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…
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…
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…
In his long-awaited first novel, American master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Lincoln in the Bardo places the reader in a Georgetown cemetery on a rainy February night in 1862. From that seed of historical truth, the story spins into a metaphysical…
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…
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…
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…
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…
