ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

In a follow-up to his masterful Say Her Name, The Interior Circuit is Goldman’s emergence from the grief of his wife’s death as he embraces Mexico’s capital as his home—a city which stands defiantly apart from so many of the social ills and violence wracking Mexico. Yet as the narco war rages on and with the restoration to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexico City’s special apartness seems threatened. In setting out to understand the menacing challenges the city now faces, Goldman delivers a poetic and philosophical chronicle that explores a remarkable and often misunderstood metropolis.*Click here to see photos from the program!

In their groundbreaking book Zoobiquity, cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and science writer Kathryn Bowers describe how they arrived at a pan-species approach to medicine. Animals do indeed get diseases ranging from brain tumors and heart attacks to anxiety and eating disorders, just like we do—and the authors explore how animal and human commonality can be used to diagnose, treat, and heal patients of all species. In her illuminating new book, Animal Madness, Laurel Braitman chronicles her parallel discoveries of what nonhuman animals can teach us about mental illness and recovery. Join us to hear what we can learn from a blind elephant, compulsive parrots, depressed gorillas, and a cow with anger management issues.*Click here to see photos from the program!

“Dear ONE,” illuminates the lives of ordinary queer Americans as recounted through letters written between 1953 and 1967, to L.A.’s ONE Magazine, the first openly gay and lesbian periodical in the United States. Looking for love, friendship, advice or understanding, readers wrote of loneliness and longing, of joy and fulfillment, and of their daily lives, hidden from history. This dramatic reading is adapted and directed by Zsa Zsa Gershick from material from ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC. *Click here to see photos from the program!

The work of British writer Geoff Dyer is frequently classified as “unclassifiable;” his writing is wildly eclectic, yet gorgeously coherent. His new book, Another Great Day at Sea—about life on an American aircraft carrier—is at the same time a travelogue, unerring social observation, and honed comedy. Zona, his meditation on the film Stalker, by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, was supposed to be a book about tennis; his book about D.H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, is essentially about not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence; and Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It is definitely not a self-help book. Rodman and Dyer will attempt to account for the “singular restlessness” of Dyer’s writing, while happily digressing on other subjects. *Click here to see photos from the program!

For decades, celebrated fiction author Denis Johnson (Jesus’ Son and Tree of Smoke) has been writing some of the most adventurous plays in modern American theater, with a major trilogy focused on the Cassandra family, a clan so star-crossed that several members are incarcerated, institutionalized or in and out of rehab. The epistolary “The Starlight on Idaho” finds the youngest son, Cass, sobering up in a clinic housed in what was once a hot-sheet motel on Idaho Street, the Starlight. While he’s there he writes screeds, pleas and confessions to members of his family, his AA sponsor, his grade school love and Satan. In this unique adaptation, addressor and addressee voice the letters together. Literature as only Denis Johnson can create it, “The Starlight on Idaho” is not quite a story, not quite a play, it is pure WordTheatre. *Click here to see photos from the program! 

New novels from Michelle Huneven (Off Course) and Mona Simpson (Casebook) both deal with love and its moral varieties, from quite different perspectives. As their characters variously struggle to forge lasting connections, they evoke issues long familiar to the psychoanalyst. Is it possible to separate out the strands of fantasy and projection, family patterning, and primal need from adult love? What makes highly intelligent, thoughtful people so thoroughly lose their way in love’s enchantment? Joining the authors to discuss love’s tangled and complex morality is eminent psychoanalyst and theorist Dr. Christopher Bollas.Click here to see photos from the program!

Edward St. Aubyn’s five-volume series of semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels are one of the most acclaimed fiction cycles in English literature. Michael Silverblatt talks with St. Aubyn about his first novel since completing his series, hailed for its satirizing of the English aristocracy. In Lost for Words, St. Aubyn employs his lethal dose of humor in a send-up of England’s premier literary prize and its controversial, eco-disastrous sponsor. St. Aubyn’s acid pen skewers the competing authors as well as the judges and corporate, political and media interests that influence such prizes.*Click here to see photos from the program!

In 1939, Union Station opened on the former site of Los Angeles’s original Chinatown—displacing thousands of Chinese and Chinese Americans. The new station fulfilled the vision of civic leaders who believed that an impressive gateway was critical to the growth of Los Angeles. In place of Chinatown, a distinctive Mission Revival station proudly stands as the centerpiece of our regional transportation system. Yet balances of power and political economies were disrupted; financial and legal battles raged on for years. This panel—including members of the Union Station Master Plan team, an architectural historian (and exhibition curator), and the vice-president of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California—will discuss the history of this architectural icon and share visions for its future.Presented in conjunction with the Getty Research Institute's exhibition of the same name in Central Library's Getty Gallery.*Click here to see photos from the program!

“Form is an Extension of Content,” wrote Charles Olson.  What is a writer’s relationship to form? Three accomplished, innovative and genre-crossing writers explore the power and influence of structure, starting with the sentence, in revealing and shaping their material. *Click here to see photos from the program!

On the occasion of her new memoir, one of America’s most beloved and accomplished classical singers shares her life story: a descendant of generations of hardworking slaves and free ancestors who grew up amid the challenges of Jim Crow racism in the south as the civil rights movement was at its nascence. Nurtured by a close family and a tight-knit community centered on the local church, Jessye Norman grew up singing songs and spirituals within a tight-knit community. Decades later, after a meteoric rise at the Berlin Opera, a debut at the Metropolitan Opera and forays into blues, jazz and other roots music she has become one of America’s cultural treasures. Join us for an evening with an inspiring artist who has lead an astonishing life.*Click here to see photos from the program!

Whitehead, the bestselling author of Zone One and an amateur player, lucked into a seat at the biggest card game in town—the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. In this raucous social satire—equally exhilarating for those who’ve played cards their whole life or who have never picked up a hand—he chronicles the gritty subculture of high-stakes Texas Hold-em.*Click here to see photos from the program!

One of America’s most talented pianists (Musical America’s 2014 Instrumentalist of the Year), and thought-provoking writers on music, Jeremy Denk (2014 Ojai Music Festival Music Director) expounds upon the magic of music making—from learning how to practice and the daily rites of discovery, to the mastery of reasoning with your muscles and the sheer joy of no longer needing to think. Denk illuminates the paradox of seeking perfection while full knowing the possibilities are infinite.*Click here to see photos from the program!

The Poetry of America’s 2014 national series The Voice of Women in American Poetry celebrates an enormous literary heritage. Distinguished contemporary poets—both male and female—will gather in five cities around the country to pay tribute to the immense achievement of a wide range of poets, from Phyllis Wheatley and Anne Bradstreet to Adrienne Rich and Lucille Clifton.  In Los Angeles, join poets Marilyn Chin on Ai, Toi Derricotte on Anne Sexton and Percival Everett on Gertrude Stein.  

What are the ideas, forms, questions, syntaxes, images, and narratives of our immediate future? Who better as our compass in the wilds of the now than emerging writers? Join students from five Southland graduate writing programs—CalArts, Otis College, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and USC—as they share recent writings and tune our ears to the future of language. *Click HERE to see photos from the program!

In the summer of 1998, Kirn—then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage—set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. In this true and chilling story of a writer being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley, Kirn invites us into the fun-house world of an eccentric son of privilege who would one day be unmasked as a serial impostor and a brutal double-murderer. *Click HERE to see photos from the program!