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…
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…
In her riveting oral history of the end of the 60s, Witness to the Revolution, Clara Bingham unveils that tumultuous time anew 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…
Writers and artists routinely reckon with anxiety and loathing as part of their creative process. Author and comedian Sara Benincasa, writer and illustrator Mari Naomi, and novelist Shanthi Sekaran, in conversation with writer and literary organizer Michelle Tea, discuss with humor and honesty the…
