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…
On this special evening, one of America’s most beloved storytellers, Judy Blume, will discuss her work—from young adult classics like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret to her new novel for adults, In the Unlikely Event. The story, inspired by a series of real-life plane crashes that occurred in…
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet discusses her new memoir, a gorgeous kaleidoscope of self and family that explores the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, religion, and unbreakable bonds. With lyrical precision and tender intelligence, Smith delves into the life and death of her…
The masterful poet and essayist shares her latest two works—Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, a dazzling collection of essays on poetry, and The Beauty, her newest book of poems—for a close look at poetry’s power to expand our perception of the perimeters of existence. Join…
Inspired by the author’s years living in Mexico and ten years of field research, this transporting, the visceral novel tells the story of young women in rural Guerrero who live in the shadows of the drug war. The poetic narrative of the heroine Lady disguised by her mother as a boy for protection…
Our second annual gathering unites students from five Southland graduate writing programs—CalArts, Otis College, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and USC—to share recent work and tune our ears to the future of the language. What are the ideas, forms, questions, syntaxes, images, and narratives of our…
Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, has time and time again offered a singular voice of reason to diagnose America’s greatest economic challenges. In his provocative new book, the bestselling author makes an urgent case for Americans to solve inequality now. Veteran…
Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, has time and time again offered a singular voice of reason to diagnose America’s greatest economic challenges. In his provocative new book, the bestselling author makes an urgent case for Americans to solve inequality now. Veteran…
