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Fiction/Literature

LAPL ID: 
1

Seriously, Just Go To Sleep

Thursday, April 19, 2012
00:45:37
ALOUD
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Episode Summary

Smart, comical, and sensible, this children's book-follow-up to the widely successful Go the F*** to Sleep by Adam Mansbach, offers kids the opportunity to recognize their tactics, giggle at their own mischievousness, and empathize with their parents' struggles, while providing both kids and parents common ground to talk about one of the most stressful aspects of parenting.

Participant(s) Bio

Adam Mansbach's novels include The End of the Jews, winner of the California Book Award and the best selling Angry Black White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Believer, Granta, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He was the 2010-2011 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University. His daughter, Vivien, is three.

Jenna Elfman is currently filming episodes of the award-winning television drama, Damages, with Glenn Close as well as a guest appearance on Showtime's Shameless. Her most recent film was 2011's Friends with Benefits. Elfman's past movies include Keeping the Faith, and Ron Howard's Edtv, among many others. She is best known for her role as Dharma in the hit series Dharma and Greg for which she garnered a Golden Globe Award, three Emmy Award nominations and two TV Guide Awards.

Attica Locke's widely acclaimed debut novel, Black Water Rising, was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, an Edgar Award, an NAACP Image Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in the UK. As a screenwriter, Locke wrote scripts for Paramount, Warner Bros, Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, and HBO. She was a fellow at the Sundance Institute's Feature Filmmakers Lab, and has served on the board of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. Her new novel, The Cutting Season, will be published in October of this year.

Ricardo Cortés has illustrated books about grass, jury duty, electricity, and the Jamaican bobsled team. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, New York magazine, the Village Voice, the San Francisco Chronicle, and on the O'Reilly Factor and CNN. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, where he is working on a book about a shark.

Photo: LAPL Photo collection

The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times

In conversation with Dr. Amy Parish
Thursday, May 24, 2012
00:00:00
ALOUD
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Episode Summary

From hired mourners who will scatter your loved one's ashes, to nameologists (who help you name your child)-the sociologist and acclaimed author of The Second Shift draws on original research to reveal the threats inherent in a world in which the most intuitive and emotional of human acts have become work for hire.

Participant(s) Bio
Arlie Russell Hochschild is the author of The Time Bind, The Second Shift, and The Managed Heart. She is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her articles have appeared in Harper's, Mother Jones, and Psychology Today, among others.

Dr. Amy Parish is a biological anthropologist, primatologist, and Darwinian feminist who has taught at University of Southern California in the Gender Studies, Arts and Letters, and Anthropology programs and departments since 1999. She has taught at University College London and conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Giessen in Germany on the topic of reciprocity.

Heart of Dankness: Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race for the Cannabis Cup

In conversation with Tod Goldberg
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
00:59:34
ALOUD
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Episode Summary

Smith takes us on a trip-mind-blowing and humorous-deep into the international underground where super-high-grade marijuana is developed, produced, sold, and entered into the Super Bowl of the marijuana world, Amsterdam's Cannabis Cup. Moving between California, the hub of the legalization and decriminalization debate, and the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, Smith infiltrates a world where science, nature, and the sometimes criminal intersect.

Participant(s) Bio
Mark Haskell Smith is the author of four novels: Moist, Delicious, Salty, and Baked. He has worked extensively in film and television; his credits include the feature films Playing God (1997) and the Brazilian film A Partilha ( 2002) and original pilots for ABC and CBS television. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of California Riverside Palm Desert MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts program.

Tod Goldberg is the author of eleven books, including the novels Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Fake Liar Cheat; and the popular Burn Notice series, as well as two collections of short fiction, Simplify and Other Resort Cities. His essays, journalism, and criticism appear regularly in many publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and Las Vegas CityLife. He directs the University of California, Riverside's Low Residency MFA program in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts.

Photo: LAPL Photo collection

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

In conversation with Susan Orlean
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
00:00:00
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
If the conscious mind is the only part of the brain we are aware of, then what in the world else is happening up there? Renowned neuroscientist (and novelist) David Eagleman navigates the depth of the subconscious brain to illuminate surprising mysteries that take in brain damage, plane spotting, dating, drugs, synesthesia, criminal law, artificial intelligence and visual illusions.
Participant(s) Bio
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action as well as the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. His scientific research has been published in journals from Science to Nature, and his neuroscience books include Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia (with Richard Cytowic) and the forthcoming Live-Wired. He is also the author of the internationally best-selling book of fiction Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.

Susan Orlean is the bestselling author of eight books, including My Kind of Place; The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; Saturday Night; and Lazy Little Loafers. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Oscar-winning movie, "Adaptation". Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend (2011) was a New York Times bestseller. Orlean has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1992. She has covered a wide range of subjects - from umbrella inventors to origami artists to skater Tonya Harding - and she has often written about animals, including show dogs, racing pigeons, animal actors, oxen, donkeys, mules, and backyard chickens.

God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse

In conversation with Jack Miles
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
01:17:19
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
Slavoj Zizek, renowned Slovenian critical theorist, dissects and reconstructs three major faith-based systems of belief in the world today, showing how each faith understands humanity and divinity-and how the differences between the faiths may be far stranger than they at first seem.
Participant(s) Bio
Slovenian philosopher and critical theorist Slavoj Zizek is among the most distinguished intellectuals of the twenty-first century. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton, Columbia, and NYU and continues to teach worldwide.

Jack Miles is Senior Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy and Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies, University of California, Irvine. A MacArthur Fellow (2003-2007), Miles won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for God: A Biography, which has since been translated into sixteen languages. He is currently general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions.

Photo: LAPL Photo collection

From the Outside Looking In: Writers Finding Their Place in Los Angeles

Moderated by David L. Ulin
Thursday, March 15, 2012
01:30:45
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
Literary Los Angeles has always existed apart from our country's publishing capital--3,000 miles apart, to be exact. What does this distance offer writers and book artists? What are the freedoms and the challenges of being outside the traditions and trends of literature? A panel of L.A. writers-authors of fiction, essays, graphic novels, screenplays, and poetry-delve into these questions, considering their impact on both the individual and the community.

Part of Pacific Standard Time, Los Angeles Art 1945-1980
Participant(s) Bio
Bernard Cooper is the author of Maps To Anywhere; A Year of Rhymes; Truth Serum; a collection of short stories, Guess Again, and his most recent book is The Bill From My Father. Cooper's many awards include the PEN/USA Ernest Hemingway Award, O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim grant, and a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in literature. His work has appeared in many anthologies, including The Best American Essays and as well, in magazines and literary reviews including, Harper's, The Paris Review, Story, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. Mr. Cooper teaches Creative Non-Fiction at Bennington College.

Joyce Farmer is best known for co-creating the Tits 'n Clits comics anthology in the 1970s, a feminist response to the rampant misogyny in underground comix. Her graphic memoir Special Exits is a Fall 2010 release from Fantagraphics Books.

Lynell George is an L.A.-based journalist and essayist. A longtime staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly, she covers books, music, visual art and social issues and identity politics. Her work has also appeared in Vibe, Essence, The Smithsonian, Black Clock and Boom: A Journal of California. Currently she is an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles where she teaches journalism.

Marisela Norte is the recipient of the Ben Reitman award from San Diego State University for Peeping Tom Tom Girl, a collection of poetry and prose. Her poems featured on MTA buses in the OUT YOUR WINDOW project were recently selected among the the ten best transit poems in the world by the Atlantic. Norte continues to document life in Los Angeles in words and through photography via public transportation.

Michael Tolkin is the author of four novels: The Player, Among the Dead, Under Radar, and The Return of the Player. He won the Writers Guild of America award for his screenplay for The Player, and also directed the movies The Rapture and The New Age.

David L. Ulin is book critic for the Los Angeles Times. From 2005-2010, he was the paper's book editor. He is the author of The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a 2002 California Book Award. His essays and criticism have appeared in many publications.

Photo: LAPL Photo collection

The Rocket's Red Glare: Politics in Art and Poetry

Co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
01:20:01
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
In an election year driven by worldwide public demonstrations, congressional stagecraft and conflicting narratives, rhetoric, aesthetics and politics are apt to collide. As part of a 2012 national series, poet-performer Douglas Kearney and artist-activist Edgar Arceneaux of the Watts House Project discuss the political impetus and implications of their work.
Participant(s) Bio
Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux has been the Director of the Watts House Project, an artist driven neighborhood redevelopment project centered around the historic Watts Towers since 1999. He is the recipient of many awards including the United States Artists Award, and his many solo shows include exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, the Kitchen, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and The Studio Museum of Harlem. His work has also been included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and California Biannual 2008. Edgar cares about the relationship between the art and the social space and has committed his professional life to its exploration.

Douglas Kearney is the author several books of poetry including Fear, Some (2006); The Black Automaton (2009), and Quantum Spit (2010.) He has received a Whiting Writers Award, a Coat Hanger award and fellowships at Idyllwild and Cave Canem. He has been commissioned to compose poetry in response to art by the Weisman Museum in the Twin Cities, the Studio Museum in Harlem, FOCA and SFMOMA. Performances of Kearney's libretti have been featured in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Europe. He teaches at CalArts.

Imagine: How Creativity Works

In conversation with Michael W. Quick
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
01:08:55
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
From the best-selling author of How We Decide comes a revelatory look at the new science of creativity. Why did Elizabethan England experience a creative explosion? What can we learn from Bob Dylan's writing habits and the drug addiction of poets? How did Pixar redesign its office space for maximum creativity? How can you embrace your own creative side and make your community more vibrant? Join us for a discussion into the deep inventiveness of the human mind, and its essential role in our increasingly complex world.
Participant(s) Bio
Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He writes the Head Case column for the Wall Street Journal and regularly appears on WNYC's Radiolab. His writing has also appeared in Nature, the New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, and Outside. Lehrer is the author of two previous books, Proust Was a Neuroscientist and How We Decide.

Dr. Michael Quick is the Executive Vice Provost at the University of Southern California and Professor of Biological Sciences in the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Dr. Quick's scholarship focuses on how drugs of abuse such as cocaine and nicotine, and therapeutic drugs such as antidepressants and anti-epileptic medications, alter the signaling properties of nerve cells.

The Anatomy of Harpo Marx

In conversation with Matias Viegener
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
00:53:33
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
Using film clips and text in a detailed play-by-play of Harpo Marx's physical movements, Koestenbaum celebrates the astonishing range of Harpo's body-- its kinks, sexual multiplicities, somnolence, Jewishness, \"cute\" pathos, and more. Holding up a mirror to Marx's 13 films, Koestenbaum takes a sharp look at American culture and mythology and the intimacies of how we communicate without words.
Participant(s) Bio
Wayne Koestenbaum has published six books of poetry, including: Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, and Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender. He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and eight books of nonfiction: The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Andy Warhol, Cleavage, Jackie Under My Skin, The Queen's Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Double Talk. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and also a Visiting Professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art.

Matias Viegener is an artist, author and critic who teaches at CalArts. He is one of the members of the art collective Fallen Fruit, which has exhibited internationally in Mexico, Colombia, Denmark, Austria (Ars Electronica), LACMA, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and ARCO 2010 in Madrid. He writes regularly on art for X-tra and ArtUS, has recently published in Cabinet, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Radical History Review, and Black Clock, and is the co-editor of Séance in Experimental Writing and The Noulipian Analects. His book 2500 Random Things About Me, Too is just out from Les Figues Press.

Concrete Rivers: The Emotional Topography of LA

In conversation with Lynell George
Thursday, April 12, 2012
01:16:23
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
Two celebrated poets read from their most recent work and discuss how Los Angeles has influenced their writing, how some influences overlap and others diverge. Born in Watts, Wanda Coleman witnessed Simon Rodia working on the Towers firsthand. Coleman's work is often concerned with the outsider, both in terms of race and poverty in California. Lewis MacAdams is a poet, journalist, filmmaker, and activist who has written on topics ranging from cultural history to the environment. Known as the Los Angeles River's most influential advocate, he co-founded the Friends of the LA River (FoLAR) and dubbed it \"a forty year art work.\"
Participant(s) Bio
Wanda Coleman was born in Watts and raised in South Central Los Angeles and has lived California from San Francisco to the Mexican border. The author of 18 books of poetry and prose, she is featured in Writing Los Angeles (2002), and Black California (2010). She has been an Emmy-winning scriptwriter and a former columnist for Los Angeles Times Magazine. Her honors include Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a 2004 C.O.L.A. Fellowship in literature from the Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles. Her most recent books include Ostinato Vamps; The Riot Inside Me: Trials & Tremors; Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales and a new collection of poems, The World Falls Away.

Lewis MacAdams is a Texas native and the author of more than a dozen books of poetry including, the most recent, Dear Oxygen. In 1970 he moved to Bolinas, a small town in West Marin County, California, where he became one of the few American poets ever to be elected to public office. In 1985, he founded Friends of the Los Angeles River, a 40-year art work to bring the Los Angeles River back to life. He remains the organization's president. His book Birth of the Cool, a history of the idea of cool, was chosen one of the best non-fiction books of the year for 2001 by the Los Angeles Times.

Lynell George is an L.A.-based journalist and essayist. A longtime staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly, she covers books, music, visual art, social issues and identity politics. Her work has also appeared in Vibe, Essence, The Smithsonian, Black Clock and Boom: A Journal of California. George is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles where she teaches journalism.

Photo: LAPL Photo collection

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